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He holds the posts of Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology (also known as Cal-(IT)2), and Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
He was born in Taft, California. In 1962, he got his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.
A 1977 paper of his discussed a problem in Ramsey theory, and gave a large number as an upper bound for its solution. This number has since become famous as the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof (and is listed in the Guinness Book of RecordsThe Guinness Book of Records (or in recent editions Guinness World Records and in previous US editions Guinness Book of World Records is a book published annually, containing an internationally recognized collection of superlatives: both in terms of human as such), and is now known as Graham's numberIntegers Graham's number named after Ronald Graham, is a very large number which is often described as the largest number that has ever been seriously used in a mathematical proof. It is much too large to be written in scientific notation, and needs speci.
Graham popularised the concept of the Erdos numberThe Erdos number of a mathematician is defined inductively as follows: Paul Erdos has an Erdos number of zero. The Erdos number of mathematician M is defined to be the minimum of the Erdos numbers of all the mathematicians that M coauthored a mathematical, named after the highly prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul ErdosPaul Erdos ( March 26, 1913 September 20, 1996) was an immensely prolific and famously eccentric mathematician who, with hundreds of collaborators, worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, (1913 - 1996). A mathematician's Erdos number is the number of links away from Erdos they are, where mathematician A is linked to mathematician B if they have co-authored a paper together. Graham's Erdos number was 1. Not only had he co-authored a paper with Erdos, but he was also a good friend. Erdos often stayed with him, and let him look after his mathematical papers and even his moneyGeneral definition of money Money is an agreement, between a community, to use something as a medium of exchange, which acts as an intermediary market good. It can be traded and exchanged for other goods. The agreement can either be explicit or implicit, for him.
Graham was featured in " Ripley's Believe It or Not" for being not only "one of the world's foremost mathematicians", but also "a highly skilled trampolinist and juggler", and "president of the International Jugglers Association " (sic).
In 20032003 is a common year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar), and also: The International Year of Freshwater The European Disability Year Summary Perhaps the defining global event of the year 2003 was the Invasion of Iraq launched by the U, Graham won the American Mathematical Society's annual Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. The prize was awarded on January 16 that year, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore, Maryland.
As of 2003, he has published about 300 papers, and five books.
He is married to Fan Chung Graham (known professionally as Fan Chung), who is the Akamai Professor in Internet Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He has two children - a daughter, Che, and a son, Marc - from an earlier marriage.