Torrence Douglas Parsons (1941–1987) was an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. He worked mainly in

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of '' graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conn ...

, and is known for introducing a graph-theoretic view of

pursuit–evasion Pursuit–evasion (variants of which are referred to as cops and robbers and graph searching) is a family of problems in mathematics and computer science in which one group attempts to track down members of another group in an environment. Early ...

problems (Parsons 1976, 1978). He obtained his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

in 1966 under the supervision of Albert W. Tucker.

Selected publications

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Selected publications

Notes

Further reading