Ron Graham has died

Very sad to hear about this. Graham apparently was the informal “administrator” who awarded the remaining prizes for problems set forth by Paul Erdős.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> Throughout his career, Erdős would offer payments for solutions to unresolved problems. These ranged from $25 for problems that he felt were just out of the reach of the current mathematical thinking (both his and others), to several thousand dollars for problems that were both difficult to attack and mathematically significant. There are thought to be at least a thousand remaining unsolved problems, though there is no official or comprehensive list. The offers remain active despite Erdős's death; Ronald Graham is the (informal) administrator of solutions. A solver can get either an original check signed by Erdős before his death (for memento only, cannot be cashed) or a cashable check from Graham.

I wonder if anyone else will continue the tradition.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

In 2002, I was an undergraduate in mathematics at UCSD. I had taken Fan Chung's graph theory class and was captivated. I asked her if I could help with any projects, said I knew perl and python. She handed me off to a graduate student who ask me to build a web crawler. They wanted to analyze the www graph. I was introduced to Ron in the hallway by Fan. I knew of him - he was one of the most famous professors in the department. I was honored to shake his hand. I never made much progress on the www crawler. I regretted my laziness later in my subpar grad school.

That's all. Just a small memory from a random person.

Very sad. If you haven't seen them, many of his Numberphile videos are quite interesting:

https://www.numberphile.com/videos/ron-graham-playlist

Here is the one on his famous, eponymous number:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8bihEe3nA

He co-authored Concrete Mathematics, which has been recommended by readers on HN:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Mathematics

Ron was a wonderful guy - approachable, kind, creative, engaging, and brilliant. He's a model for all of us: welcoming to novices and experts, communicating with clarity, and encouraging a sense of whimsey. I will miss him deeply.

Besides being a famous mathematician he was an avid juggler. He inspired Steve Mills to invent what is known as Mills' Mess. Here is an old quote from him regarding math and juggling:

"The applications aren't the point," Graham says. "I look at mathematics pretty globally. It represents the ultimate structure and order. And I associate doing with [sic] mathematics with control. Jugglers like to be able to control a situation. There's a well-known saying in juggling: 'The trouble is that the balls go where you throw them. 'It's just you. It's not the phases of the moon, or someone else's fault. It's like chess. It's all out in the open. Mathematics is really there for you to discover."

-- Ronald Graham

Quoted from:

http://juggling.org/bin/news2html/1996/02/05-220104

Concrete Mathematics was recommended to me as a fresh grad by my first mentor, and it had a profound impact on how I approached problems and improved my mathematical literacy immensely. It is probably the most approachable "high level" maths text I own, and after spending some of my career doing technical writing involving mathematics the one thing I've learned is that it takes a masterful mind to be a communicator of the abstract, and Ron Graham was one of the greatest masters of that skill of our time.

Truly a loss.

Ron was great. I'll cherish our emails back and fourth.

what he did to facilitate Erdos' way of life has always made me envious of his altruism. I wish I could be that good of a fellow human.

Does anyone know what he died of?

The Reddit discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_pas... has comments by puleshan aka Steve Butler giving the time and place of death as 7:30 PM Monday night in La Jolla. But nowhere can I find a cause of death.

(The obvious guess given his age and the times being COVID-19...just like Conway.)

It's via Ron that I have my Erdos number (of the first kind) of 2. He was warm, welcoming, kind, enthusiastic, engaging, and a wonderful person to be with, let alone work with.

I wrote[0] about how I first met him, and while we didn't meet often, it was always a pleasure, and he always greeted me warmly. I'm sad to think I won't see him again. I'll miss him.

[0] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/MeetingRonGraham.html?tg08hn

I took his discrete math course :) He was an amazing professor and it was such an honor to learn from him. He showed off his juggling skills on the last day of lecture and it was also quite impressive!

Wow, I didn't know this was the same Graham as the Graham's Number[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number

Wow, very sad to hear this. I am a big fan of Professor Graham. I owned many of his books - Magical Mathematics, Rudiments of Ramsey Theory, Concrete Mathematics, Handbook of Combinatorics. I attended an AMS conference in San Diego a while back and asked him to sign my Erdos on Graphs book after listening to his talk. Professor Chung happened to be around and he waved her over to sign my book too.

Just here to pay tribute to this incredible human being. So many accomplishments. Brilliant mathematician and juggler. RIP.

While he was never my professor at UCSD, the respect the faculty had for him was palpable. His name must've been mentioned a dozen times throughout my undergrad, so much so I decided to look for his (empty) office in the CSE building one day. We're all fortunate for his contribution and my prayers are with his family.

My M.S. thesis was based upon his pioneering paper, the first paper to analyze the performance of a heuristic, "Bounds on Multiprocessing Timing Anomalies.", 1968. Thank you, Ron Graham! I was also privileged once to review a random graphs paper from Fan Chung his wife!

I recall reading about him as a teen in the great little bio book https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-People-Interviews-Donald... There's a brief preview you can find in the Look Inside Amazon feature, navigating to the table of contents, which lists Ronald L. Graham on pg 105.

Very entertaining read.

Wow. Conway and now Graham.

Paul Hoffman talks about Ron Graham's house and Erdos in this interesting talk about The Man Who Loved Only Numbers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9634A0iBw7w

Thank you for all of it, Dr. Graham!

What a life.

He's a great teacher. I miss him. Thanks.

:-(