Ronald Cedric Read (19 December 1924 – 7 January 2019) was a British mathematician, latterly a professor emeritus of mathematics at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

, Canada. He published many books and papers, primarily on enumeration of

graph Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

graph isomorphism In graph theory, an isomorphism of graphs ''G'' and ''H'' is a bijection between the vertex sets of ''G'' and ''H'' : f \colon V(G) \to V(H) such that any two vertices ''u'' and ''v'' of ''G'' are adjacent in ''G'' if and only if f(u) and f(v) ...

chromatic polynomial The chromatic polynomial is a graph polynomial studied in algebraic graph theory, a branch of mathematics. It counts the number of graph colorings as a function of the number of colors and was originally defined by George David Birkhoff to stu ...

s, and particularly, the use of computers in graph-theoretical research. A majority of his later work was done in Waterloo. Read received his Ph.D. (1959) in graph theory from the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degre ...

Life and career

Ronald Read served in the Royal Navy during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

, then completed a degree in mathematics at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

before joining the University College of the West Indies (later

the University of the West Indies The University of the West Indies (UWI), originally University College of the West Indies, is a public university system established to serve the higher education needs of the residents of 17 English-speaking countries and territories in the ...

) in Jamaica as the second founding member of the Mathematics Department there. In 1970 he moved his family to Canada to take up a post as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. While in Jamaica he became interested in cave exploration, and in 1957 he founded the Jamaica Caving Club. He had a lifelong interest in the making of string figures and is the inventor of the . He was an accomplished musician and played many instruments including violin, viola, cello, double bass, piano, guitar, lute, and many early music instruments, some of which he also built. He had diplomas in Theory and in Composition from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Canada, and composed four works for orchestra and several pieces for smaller groups. Read died in January 2019 at the age of 94.Ronald (Ron) Cedric READ
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Selected papers

* An Introduction to Chromatic Polynomials. Journal of Combinatorial Theory 4 (1968) 52 - 71. * Every One A Winner; or How to avoid isomorphism search when cataloguing combinatorial configurations. Annals of Discrete Mathematics 2, North-Holland Publishing Company (1978) 107-120. * (With P. Rosenstiehl) On the Principal Edge Tripartition of a Graph. Annals of Discrete Mathematics 3, North-Holland Publishing Company, (1978) 195-226. * (With

W. T. Tutte William Thomas Tutte OC FRS FRSC (; 14 May 1917 – 2 May 2002) was an English and Canadian codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major ...

), Chromatic Polynomials. Selected Topics in Graph Theory, Vol. 3 (1988) 15-42. * (with G. F. Royle) Chromatic Roots of Families of Graphs. Graph Theory, Combinatorics and Applications. John Wiley (1991) 1009 - 1029 * Prospects for Graph-theoretical Algorithms. Annals of Discrete Mathematics 55 (1993) 201 - 210.

Books

* * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Read, Ronald C. 1924 births 2019 deaths 20th-century English mathematicians Alumni of the University of London British expatriate academics in Canada Graph theorists Academic staff of the University of Waterloo

Life and career

Selected papers

Books

See also

References