
Ron Graham has died - jhfdbkofdcho
https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6244
======
maddyboo
Very sad to hear about this. Graham apparently was the informal
“administrator” who awarded the remaining prizes for problems set forth by
Paul Erdős.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> Throughout his career, Erdős would offer payments for solutions to
> unresolved problems. These ranged from $25 for problems that he felt were
> just out of the reach of the current mathematical thinking (both his and
> others), to several thousand dollars for problems that were both difficult
> to attack and mathematically significant. There are thought to be at least a
> thousand remaining unsolved problems, though there is no official or
> comprehensive list. The offers remain active despite Erdős's death; Ronald
> Graham is the (informal) administrator of solutions. A solver can get either
> an original check signed by Erdős before his death (for memento only, cannot
> be cashed) or a cashable check from Graham.

I wonder if anyone else will continue the tradition.

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s)

~~~
rjtobin
Maybe his wife, Fan Chung, who was also a close collaborator of Erdős (13
joint papers), or one of Ron's students will continue the tradition (maybe
Steve Butler).

Very sad news in any case.

------
rough-sea
In 2002, I was an undergraduate in mathematics at UCSD. I had taken Fan
Chung's graph theory class and was captivated. I asked her if I could help
with any projects, said I knew perl and python. She handed me off to a
graduate student who ask me to build a web crawler. They wanted to analyze the
www graph. I was introduced to Ron in the hallway by Fan. I knew of him - he
was one of the most famous professors in the department. I was honored to
shake his hand. I never made much progress on the www crawler. I regretted my
laziness later in my subpar grad school.

That's all. Just a small memory from a random person.

~~~
icotyl
I was there around the same time and I took a discrete math course he taught.

I wasn't a math major and had no idea who he was, but I remember some students
mentioning that he was a well-regarded mathematician. He was a good teacher as
well.

Fan, who was also Ron's wife, has a webpage about him:
[http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~fan/ron/](http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~fan/ron/)

------
eindiran
Very sad. If you haven't seen them, many of his Numberphile videos are quite
interesting:

[https://www.numberphile.com/videos/ron-graham-
playlist](https://www.numberphile.com/videos/ron-graham-playlist)

Here is the one on his famous, eponymous number:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8bihEe3nA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8bihEe3nA)

~~~
LVB
Brady posted a nice tribute: [https://www.bradyharanblog.com/blog/the-day-i-
met-ron-graham](https://www.bradyharanblog.com/blog/the-day-i-met-ron-graham)

------
melling
He co-authored Concrete Mathematics, which has been recommended by readers on
HN:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Mathematics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Mathematics)

------
CliffStoll
Ron was a wonderful guy - approachable, kind, creative, engaging, and
brilliant. He's a model for all of us: welcoming to novices and experts,
communicating with clarity, and encouraging a sense of whimsey. I will miss
him deeply.

------
weinzierl
Besides being a famous mathematician he was an avid juggler. He inspired Steve
Mills to invent what is known as Mills' Mess. Here is an old quote from him
regarding math and juggling:

 _" The applications aren't the point," Graham says. "I look at mathematics
pretty globally. It represents the ultimate structure and order. And I
associate doing with [sic] mathematics with control. Jugglers like to be able
to control a situation. There's a well-known saying in juggling: 'The trouble
is that the balls go where you throw them. 'It's just you. It's not the phases
of the moon, or someone else's fault. It's like chess. It's all out in the
open. Mathematics is really there for you to discover."_

\-- Ronald Graham

Quoted from:

[http://juggling.org/bin/news2html/1996/02/05-220104](http://juggling.org/bin/news2html/1996/02/05-220104)

~~~
jacquesm
> The trouble is that the balls go where you throw them. 'It's just you.

Ditto for computer programs: they always do exactly what you tell them to do,
which is rarely what you really want.

~~~
eitland
> Ditto for computer programs: they always do exactly what you tell them to
> do, which is rarely what you really want.

I guess this is a joke since I think you are good at programming, but on a
more serious note if anyone actually has this problem they might want to
change to a different language.

With a few different languages I actually feel they do what I want 99% of the
time or more.

I'll leave out naming any names here as I'm not trying to change anyone who is
currently happy where they are.

~~~
jacquesm
Every bug _ever_ was a computer program that did exactly what the programmer
told the computer to do but not what was intended. I'd like to meet the guy or
girl that never coded up something with a bug, even the greats mess up.

Donald Knuth famously wrote: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only
proved it correct, not tried it.", see also: the doctrine of testing.

~~~
RWSen
> Every bug ever was a computer program that did exactly what the programmer
> told the computer to do [...]

Ironically, the first ever computer bug does not fit your claim [0].

[0]:
[https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/september/9/](https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/september/9/)

~~~
jacquesm
I knew someone would mention that.

------
qppo
Concrete Mathematics was recommended to me as a fresh grad by my first mentor,
and it had a profound impact on how I approached problems and improved my
mathematical literacy immensely. It is probably the most approachable "high
level" maths text I own, and after spending some of my career doing technical
writing involving mathematics the one thing I've learned is that it takes a
masterful mind to be a communicator of the abstract, and Ron Graham was one of
the greatest masters of that skill of our time.

Truly a loss.

------
serf
Ron was great. I'll cherish our emails back and fourth.

what he did to facilitate Erdos' way of life has always made me envious of his
altruism. I wish I could be that good of a fellow human.

~~~
core-questions
Anywhere I can read on that?

~~~
jodrellblank
Somewhat in the book The Man who Loved Only Numbers[1], it's a biography of
Paul Erdos who was mostly homeless and spent his life travelling around other
mathematicians' homes staying with them a few days at a time, and Ron Graham
did a lot of looking after him and his life, pay, bureacracy, etc, so gets
quite a few mentions.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Loved_Only_Numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Loved_Only_Numbers)

~~~
newman314
Read this a while ago, quite an enjoyable read. Recommended.

------
btilly
Does anyone know what he died of?

The Reddit discussion at
[https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_pas...](https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_passed_away_earlier_this_evening_at/)
has comments by puleshan aka Steve Butler giving the time and place of death
as 7:30 PM Monday night in La Jolla. But nowhere can I find a cause of death.

(The obvious guess given his age and the times being COVID-19...just like
Conway.)

~~~
devit
He commented "his health had been in decline for the last few years but
accelerated dramatically in the last few weeks. Not covid."
[[https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_pas...](https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_passed_away_earlier_this_evening_at/fx6yklp/)]

------
ColinWright
It's via Ron that I have my Erdos number (of the first kind) of 2. He was
warm, welcoming, kind, enthusiastic, engaging, and a wonderful person to be
with, let alone work with.

I wrote[0] about how I first met him, and while we didn't meet often, it was
always a pleasure, and he always greeted me warmly. I'm sad to think I won't
see him again. I'll miss him.

[0]
[https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/MeetingRonGraham.html?tg08hn](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/MeetingRonGraham.html?tg08hn)

------
foobaw
I took his discrete math course :) He was an amazing professor and it was such
an honor to learn from him. He showed off his juggling skills on the last day
of lecture and it was also quite impressive!

------
lolptdr
Wow, I didn't know this was the same Graham as the Graham's Number[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number)

~~~
pfarrell
WaitButWhy has a great longform piece explaining how big Graham’s number is.
Like, make your stomach drop, big. Bonus, it contains an explanation of Knuth
notation.

[https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-
number.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html)

~~~
zimpenfish
And then you get Tree(3) which when compared means "[Graham's number] might as
well be 1".

[https://joshkerr.com/tree3-is-a-big-number-i-mean-really-
big...](https://joshkerr.com/tree3-is-a-big-number-i-mean-really-big/)

Maths is wacky.

------
PatrickChoi
Wow, very sad to hear this. I am a big fan of Professor Graham. I owned many
of his books - Magical Mathematics, Rudiments of Ramsey Theory, Concrete
Mathematics, Handbook of Combinatorics. I attended an AMS conference in San
Diego a while back and asked him to sign my Erdos on Graphs book after
listening to his talk. Professor Chung happened to be around and he waved her
over to sign my book too.

------
embit
Just here to pay tribute to this incredible human being. So many
accomplishments. Brilliant mathematician and juggler. RIP.

------
tritons1
While he was never my professor at UCSD, the respect the faculty had for him
was palpable. His name must've been mentioned a dozen times throughout my
undergrad, so much so I decided to look for his (empty) office in the CSE
building one day. We're all fortunate for his contribution and my prayers are
with his family.

------
systemBuilder
My M.S. thesis was based upon his pioneering paper, the first paper to analyze
the performance of a heuristic, "Bounds on Multiprocessing Timing Anomalies.",
1968. Thank you, Ron Graham! I was also privileged once to review a random
graphs paper from Fan Chung his wife!

------
jxramos
I recall reading about him as a teen in the great little bio book
[https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-People-Interviews-
Donald...](https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-People-Interviews-Donald-
Albers/dp/1568813406) There's a brief preview you can find in the Look Inside
Amazon feature, navigating to the table of contents, which lists Ronald L.
Graham on pg 105.

Very entertaining read.

------
crb002
Wow. Conway and now Graham.

------
jkuria
Paul Hoffman talks about Ron Graham's house and Erdos in this interesting talk
about The Man Who Loved Only Numbers:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9634A0iBw7w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9634A0iBw7w)

------
forgotmypw17
[http://archive.is/GyARs](http://archive.is/GyARs)

------
keithflower
Thank you for all of it, Dr. Graham!

What a life.

------
eqtheo
He's a great teacher. I miss him. Thanks.

------
utopcell
:-(

