Allan R. Wilks

Allan Reeve Wilks (born March 8, 1954 ) is an American mathematician and computer scientist .

Allan Wilks received his PhD in 1981 from Peter Bloomfield at Princeton University (Optimal Design of Observation Times for Continuous Time Series). He then worked as a mathematician at ATT Bell Laboratories . By Richard A. Becker (Rick Becker) and John M. Chambers , he is co-developer of the programming language of Statistics S . Originally it was freeware, later commercial software packages emerged from it.

At the end of the 1990s he and Colin Mallows made progress on the Apollonian problem of finding the fourth all three touching circles for three given touching circles. They found that Descartes' theorem gives not only the radius of the fourth circle, but also its location (if one takes the complex version). This enabled them to write efficient programs for constructing Apollonian circular packs.

Fonts

• Richard A. Becker, John M. Chambers, Allan R. Wilks: The New S Language. Chapman & Hall / CRC, London 1988
• Ronald L. Graham , Jeffrey Lagarias , Colin L. Mallows, Allan R. Wilks, Catherine H. Yan: Apollonian circle packings: number theory, J. Number Theory, Volume 100, 2003, pp. 1-45, Arxiv
• Ronald L. Graham, Jeffrey Lagarias, Colin L. Mallows, Allan R. Wilks, Catherine H. Yan: Apollonian circle packings: geometry and group theory. I. The Apollonian group, Discrete Comput. Geom., Volume 34, 2005, pp. 547-585, Arxiv , part 2, Super-Apollonian group and integral packings, ibid., Volume 35, 2006, pp. 1-36, Arxiv , part 3, Higher Dimensions, ibid ., Vol. 35, 2006, pp. 37-72, Arxiv
• Lagarias, Mallows, Wilks: Beyond the Descartes circle theorem, American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 109, 2002, pp. 338-361, Arxiv

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Date of birth according to VIAF
2. ↑ Allan R. Wilks in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)