Rowland Leonard Brooks (February 6, 1916 – June 18, 1993)
squaring.net, retrieved 2010-07-30. was an English mathematician, known for proving Brooks's theorem on the relation between the

chromatic number In graph theory, graph coloring is a methodic assignment of labels traditionally called "colors" to elements of a graph. The assignment is subject to certain constraints, such as that no two adjacent elements have the same color. Graph coloring i ...

and the degree of

graphs 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 ...

. He was born in

Lincolnshire Lincolnshire (), abbreviated ''Lincs'', is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the East Midlands and Yorkshire and the Humber regions of England. It is bordered by the East Riding of Yorkshire across the Humber estuary to th ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

, studied at

Trinity College Trinity College may refer to: Australia * Trinity Anglican College, an Anglican coeducational primary and secondary school in , New South Wales * Trinity Catholic College, Auburn, a coeducational school in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, New ...

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

, and also worked with fellow Trinity students

W. T. Tutte William Thomas Tutte (; 14 May 1917 – 2 May 2002) was an English and Canadian code breaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system ...

, Cedric Smith, and

Arthur Harold Stone Arthur Harold Stone (30 September 1916 – 6 August 2000) was a British mathematician, born in London, who worked at the universities of Manchester and Rochester, mostly in topology. His wife was American mathematician Dorothy Maharam. Sto ...

on the problem of "

Squaring the square Squaring the square is the problem of tessellation, tiling an integral square using only other integral squares. (An integral square is a square (geometry), square whose sides have integer length.) The name was coined in a humorous analogy with sq ...

" (partitioning

rectangle In Euclidean geometry, Euclidean plane geometry, a rectangle is a Rectilinear polygon, rectilinear convex polygon or a quadrilateral with four right angles. It can also be defined as: an equiangular quadrilateral, since equiangular means that a ...

s and

square In geometry, a square is a regular polygon, regular quadrilateral. It has four straight sides of equal length and four equal angles. Squares are special cases of rectangles, which have four equal angles, and of rhombuses, which have four equal si ...

s into unequal squares), both under their own names and under the

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true meaning ( orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individual's o ...

Blanche Descartes Blanche Descartes was a collaborative pseudonym used by the English people, English mathematicians R. Leonard Brooks, Arthur Harold Stone, Cedric Smith (statistician), Cedric Smith, and W. T. Tutte. The four mathematicians met in 1935 as undergradu ...

.. After leaving Cambridge, he worked as a full-time tax inspector.

References

1916 births 1993 deaths Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Graph theorists 20th-century English mathematicians {{UK-mathematician-stub