Gerard Laman (born August 22, 1924, Leiden; died September 22, 2009, Amsterdam), was a Dutch mathematician who worked on graph theory.
He completed high school studies at the Stedelijk Gymnasium Leiden in 1942. His study of Mathematics at Leiden University was delayed by a period in hiding to evade enforced labor during the occupation of the Netherlands by Germany in the second world war. He completed Mathematics with a minor in mechanics in 1952. From 1949 onwards, he was a scientific assistant to Prof.dr. J. Haantjes.
With a stipend of the Dutch-Belgian Cultural Accord, he was privately taught in combinatorial topology of fibre spaces, in Brussels, Belgium by Prof.dr. G. Hirsch of the Agricultural University of Ghent in 1953.
From 1954 to 1957 he worked as a high school teacher of mathematics at the Delft high school 'Gemeentelijke Hogere Burgerschool HBS'.
In 1959 he completed his PhD thesis (Laman 1959) at Leiden University. Prof. dr. W.T. van Est acted as promotor, since the original promotor, Prof. Haantjes had died.
From 1957 to 1967 he worked as a lecturer at the 'Technische Hogeschool' of Eindhoven (now Eindhoven University of Technology).
From 1967 to his retirement in 1989, he worked as a lecturer at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Amsterdam, teaching discrete mathematics, and also mathematics for students in Econometrics. Gerard Laman regards himself mostly as a teacher of mathematics, where structuredness of thinking, as well as brevity in speech and writing are his forte.
His main scientific contribution is the 'Laman graph' (Laman 1970). In graph theory, the Laman graphs are a family of sparse graphs describing the minimally rigid systems of rods and joints in the plane, see for example the paper Owen & Power 2007.
As Gerard Laman did not mind pointing out himself, his original publication in 1970 went largely unnoticed first. Only when Prof. dr. Branko Grünbaum, Seattle, Washington, USA, together with Dr. G.C. Shephard, wrote about Laman's paper in their Lectures on lost mathematics, 1978, did this work receive more attention in the mathematical community.
Towards the end of his life, Gerard Laman worked on the challenge to lift the original 'Laman graph' from the two dimensions of its original description to three dimensions, inspired by a simple counter example, the 'double banana graph' (Graver, Servatius & Servatius 1993, p. 12).