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Ronald Graham

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Mathematician

The Resume

    (October 31, 1935-July 6, 2020)
    Born in Taft, California
    Director of Information Technology at Bell Labs
    Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
    Described by the American Mathematical Society as ‘one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years’
    Created Graham’s Number as the upper bound for the answer of a problem in Ramsey theory (1977)

Why he might be annoying:

    Graham’s Number gained a certain degree of fame when Martin Gardner’s mentioned it in his ‘Mathematical Games’ column as the largest specific integer used in a mathematical proof, after which it was added as an entry in the Guinness Book of Records (1980).
    The number is so big that if you tried writing it out with each digit occupying a Planck volume (believed to be the smallest measurable volume possible), the result could not fit inside the observable universe.
    If you tried writing out just the number of digits in Graham’s Number, that number would be too large to fit into the observable universe.
    For that matter, the number of digits in the number representing the number of digits in Graham’s Number is also too large to fit into the observable universe.
    And the number of digits in that number wouldn’t fit in the universe either. And you could keep the process up for over a googol (10 to the power of 100 – a number larger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe) of iterations and still not have a number small enough to fit within the universe. (Is your mind blown yet?)
    Graham’s Number basically outlived its usefulness in mathematics, as a smaller number has since been proven to be an upper bound to the same problem in Ramsey theory.
    Its been displaced as a record holder by even larger numbers, such as TREE(3), used in Kurskal’s tree theorem, whatever that is.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He popularized the concept of the Erdos number. (His was 1, the two having collaborated on nearly thirty papers.)
    He also kept a room at his house for Paul Erdos to stay in, managed the money for prizes Erdos offered, and kept track of Erdos’ mathematical papers.
    He was president of both the Mathematical Association of America and the International Jugglers Association

Credit: C. Fishel


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Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 93 Votes: 41.94% Annoying