Steven Kay Butler (born May 16, 1977) is an American mathematician specializing in graph theory and combinatorics. He is a Morrill Professor and the Barbara J. Janson Professor in Mathematics at Iowa State University.
Butler earned his master's degree at Brigham Young University in 2003. His master's thesis was titled Bounding the Number of Graphs Containing Very Long Induced Paths. [1] He completed a doctorate at the University of California, San Diego in 2008, authoring the dissertation Eigenvalues and Structures of Graphs, advised by Fan Chung. [2] [3] Upon completing his postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Butler joined the Iowa State University faculty in 2011. [4] [5] In 2015, Butler became the 512th (and so far final) person to have an Erdős number of 1, when he published a paper with Paul Erdős and Ronald Graham on Egyptian fractions. [6] In 2017, Butler was named the Barbara J. Janson Professor in Mathematics, [4] and to a Morrill Professorship in 2022. [7]
Butler has been a project lead for the Iowa State University Math REU in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024, and will head a project in 2025. [8]
The Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between mathematician Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. The same principle has been applied in other fields where a particular individual has collaborated with a large and broad number of peers.
Ronald Lewis Graham was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He was president of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and his honors included the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Fan-Rong King Chung Graham, known professionally as Fan Chung, is a Taiwanese-born American mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution.
In mathematics, spectral graph theory is the study of the properties of a graph in relationship to the characteristic polynomial, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors of matrices associated with the graph, such as its adjacency matrix or Laplacian matrix.
Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. Erdős pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. He championed and contributed to Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions in which order necessarily appears. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open problems, rather than developing or exploring new areas of mathematics.
Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős from the age of 14.
Ralph Jasper Faudree was a mathematician, a professor of mathematics and the former provost of the University of Memphis.
Endre Szemerédi is a Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist, working in the field of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. He has been the State of New Jersey Professor of computer science at Rutgers University since 1986. He also holds a professor emeritus status at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Richard Kenneth Guy was a British mathematician. He was a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calgary. He is known for his work in number theory, geometry, recreational mathematics, combinatorics, and graph theory. He is best known for co-authorship of Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and authorship of Unsolved Problems in Number Theory. He published more than 300 scholarly articles. Guy proposed the partially tongue-in-cheek "strong law of small numbers", which says there are not enough small integers available for the many tasks assigned to them – thus explaining many coincidences and patterns found among numerous cultures. For this paper he received the MAA Lester R. Ford Award.
László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 and the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.
In combinatorial number theory, the Erdős–Graham problem is the problem of proving that, if the set of integers greater than one is partitioned into finitely many subsets, then one of the subsets can be used to form an Egyptian fraction representation of unity. That is, for every , and every -coloring of the integers greater than one, there is a finite monochromatic subset of these integers such that
Daniel J. Kleitman is an American mathematician and professor of applied mathematics at MIT. His research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, genomics, and operations research.
Václav (Vašek) Chvátal is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and a visiting professor at Charles University in Prague. He has published extensively on topics in graph theory, combinatorics, and combinatorial optimization.
Van H. Vu is a Vietnamese mathematician and the Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University.
Carl Svante Janson is a Swedish mathematician. A member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 1994, Janson has been the chaired professor of mathematics at Uppsala University since 1987.
John Cameron Urschel is a Canadian-American mathematician and former professional football guard. He played college football at Penn State and was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL draft. Urschel played his entire NFL career with Baltimore before announcing his retirement on July 27, 2017, at 26 years old.
Phyllis Zweig Chinn is an American mathematician who holds a professorship in mathematics, women's studies, and teaching preparation at Cal Poly Humboldt in California. Her publications concern graph theory, mathematics education, and the history of women in mathematics.
József Balogh is a Hungarian-American mathematician, specializing in graph theory and combinatorics.