John Riordan (mathematician)
| John Riordan | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 22, 1903 Derby, Connecticut, United States |
| Died |
August 26, 1988 (aged 85) Scituate, Massachusetts, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Yale University |
| Occupation | Mathematician |
| Years active | 1926–1968 |
| Spouse(s) | Mavis McIntosh |
John F. Riordan (April 22, 1903 – August 26, 1988)[1] was an American mathematician and the author of major early works in combinatorics, particularly Introduction to Combinatorial Analysis and Combinatorial Identities.
Life
Riordan was a graduate of Yale. In his early life he wrote a number of poems and essays and a book of short-stories, On the Make, published in 1929, and was Editor-in-Chief of Salient and The Figure in the Carpet, literary magazines published by The New School for Social Research in New York. He married Mavis McIntosh, the well-known poet and literary agent.
Riordan's long professional career was at Bell Labs, which he joined in 1926 (a year after its foundation) and where he remained, publishing over a hundred scholarly papers on combinatorial analysis, until he retired in 1968. He then joined the faculty at Rockefeller University as professor emeritus. A Festschrift was published in his honor in 1978.[2]
Throughout his life Riordan led an active literary life, with many distinguished friends such as Kenneth Burke, William Carlos Williams and A. R. Orage.
Tribute
From an interview with Neil Sloane published by Bell Labs:
- Even at the end of my first year as a graduate student at Cornell, in 1962, I managed to arrange a summer job at Bell Labs in Holmdel. This was still on minimal cost networks. During that summer I met another of my heroes, John Riordan, one of the great early workers in combinatorics. His book An Introduction to Combinatorial Analysis is a classic. He was working at Bell Labs in West Street in Manhattan at that time. One of my earliest papers, on a problem that came up in my thesis work, was a joint paper with him.[3]
Selected publications
- Riordan, John (1929). On the Make. Farrar & Rinehart. OCLC 7532863. (book of 14 short-stories)
- Carlitz, Leonard; Riordan, John (1956). "The number of labeled two-terminal series-parallel networks". Duke Mathematics Journal (Duke University Press).
- Riordan, John (1958). Introduction to Combinatorial Analysis. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02365-6.[4] (reissued in 1980; reprinted again in 2002 by Courier Dover Publications) translated into Russian in 1962.
- Riordan, John (1962). Stochastic Service Systems. John Wiley & Sons. LCCN 62008785.
- Riordan, John (1968). Combinatorial Identities. John Wiley & Sons. LCCN 67031375. OCLC 681863847.[5] (reprinted with corrections: Riordan, John (1979). Combinatorial Identities. R.E. Krieger Pub. Co. ISBN 978-0-88275-829-9.)
Erdős number
Riordan's Erdős number is 2.
Notes
- ↑ John F. Riordan, 85, Ex-Bell Labs Engineer, The New York Times, August 31, 1988
- ↑ Kac, M. (May 1978). "Special Issue in Honor of Riordan, John - Introduction". Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A (Academic Press) 24 (3).
- ↑ J. Riordan, N. J. A. Sloane (1969). "The enumeration of rooted trees by total height". J. Austral. Math. Soc. 10: 278–282. doi:10.1017/S1446788700007527.
- ↑ Harary, Frank (1959). "Review: Introduction to combinatorial analysis, by John Riordan" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 65 (3): 166–169. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1959-10314-1.
- ↑ Stein, Paul R. (1972). "Review: Combinatorial identities, by John Riordan" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 78 (4): 490–496. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1972-12968-9.
External links
- Former Members of the Technical Staff in the mathematics group at Bell Laboratories.
- Books on discrete mathematics listed at an MAA site.
- A history of mathematics at Bell Labs
- A Guide to John F. Riordan Papers' Rockefeller University Faculty FA 191
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