Adriano Mario Garsia (20 August 1928 – 6 October 2024) was a

Tunis Tunis (, ') is the capital city, capital and largest city of Tunisia. The greater metropolitan area of Tunis, often referred to as "Grand Tunis", has about 2,700,000 inhabitants. , it is the third-largest city in the Maghreb region (after Casabl ...

ian-born

Italian American Italian Americans () are Americans who have full or partial Italians, Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeastern United States, Northeast and industrial Midwestern United States, Midwestern ...

mathematician who worked in

analysis Analysis (: analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many ...

representation theory Representation theory is a branch of mathematics that studies abstract algebra, abstract algebraic structures by ''representing'' their element (set theory), elements as linear transformations of vector spaces, and studies Module (mathematics), ...

, and

algebraic geometry Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics which uses abstract algebraic techniques, mainly from commutative algebra, to solve geometry, geometrical problems. Classically, it studies zero of a function, zeros of multivariate polynomials; th ...

. He was a student of

Charles Loewner Charles Loewner (29 May 1893 – 8 January 1968) was an American mathematician. His name was Karel Löwner in Czech and Karl Löwner in German. Early life and career Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lany, about 30 km from Prag ...

and published work on representation theory,

symmetric function In mathematics, a function of n variables is symmetric if its value is the same no matter the order of its arguments. For example, a function f\left(x_1,x_2\right) of two arguments is a symmetric function if and only if f\left(x_1,x_2\right) = f\ ...

s, and

algebraic combinatorics Algebraic combinatorics is an area of mathematics that employs methods of abstract algebra, notably group theory and representation theory, in various combinatorial contexts and, conversely, applies combinatorial techniques to problems in algeb ...

. He and

Mark Haiman Mark David Haiman is a mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley who proved the Macdonald positivity conjecture for Macdonald polynomials. He received his Ph.D. in 1984 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the directi ...

made the n! conjecture. He is also the namesake of the

Garsia–Wachs algorithm The Garsia–Wachs algorithm is an efficient method for computers to construct optimal binary search trees and Huffman coding, alphabetic Huffman codes, in linearithmic time. It is named after Adriano Garsia and Michelle L. Wachs. Problem descripti ...

for

optimal binary search tree In computer science, an optimal binary search tree (Optimal BST), sometimes called a weight-balanced binary tree, is a binary search tree which provides the smallest possible search time (or Expected value, expected search time) for a given sequen ...

s, which he published with his student Michelle L. Wachs in 1977.

Life

Born to Italian Tunisians in

on 20 August 1928, Garsia moved to

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

in 1946. , he had 36 students and at least 200 descendants, according to the data at the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. it contained information on 300,152 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a typical mathematicia ...

. He was on the faculty of the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

. He retired in 2013 after 57 years at UCSD as a founding member of the Mathematics Department. At his 90 Birthday Conference in 2019, it was notable that he was the oldest principal investigator of a grant from the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

in the country. In 2012, he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Retrieved 19 January 2013.

Books by A. Garsia

* Adriano M. Garsia, ''Topics in Almost Everywhere Convergence'', Lectures in Advanced Mathematics Volume 4, Markham Publishing Co., Chicago, Ill., 1970. * Adriano M. Garsia, ''Martingale inequalities: Seminar Notes on Recent Progress'', Mathematics Lecture Notes Series, W. A. Benjamin, Inc., Reading, Mass.-London-Amsterdam, 1973. * Adriano M. Garsia and

, ''Orbit Harmonics and Graded Representations'', Research Monograph, to appear as part of the collection published by the Laboratoire de Combinatoire et d'Informatique Mathématique, edited by S. Brlek,

Université du Québec à Montréal The (UQAM; ), is a French language, French-language public university, public research university based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is the largest constituent element of the system. UQAM was founded on April 9, 1969, by the government o ...

. * Adriano M. Garsia and Ömer Eğecioğlu, ''Lessons in Enumerative Combinatorics'', Graduate Texts in Mathematics 290, Springer Nature, Switzerland AG, 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-71249-5.

References

External links

* 1928 births Italian emigrants to the United States 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Stanford University alumni University of California, San Diego faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society People from Tunis Combinatorialists Scientists from California Italian expatriates in Tunisia {{US-mathematician-stub