Joel H. Spencer

Joel H. Spencer (born April 20, 1946 in Brooklyn ) is an American mathematician ( combinatorial science ) and computer scientist .

Spencer won the Putnam competition as a teenager in 1962, studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( Bachelor 1965) and received his doctorate in 1970 under Andrew Gleason at Harvard University ( Probabilistic methods in combinatorial theory ). 1967/68 he was at Bell Laboratories and then until 1971 at the Rand Corporation . From 1971 he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles , from 1972 at MIT and from 1975 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook . From 1988 he was a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University . Among other things, he was visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (1997, 1998), the Mittag-Leffler Institute , Microsoft , the University of Melbourne , Budapest and the Weizmann Institute .

Spencer is a student of Paul Erdős . He dealt with Ramsey theory , asymptotic combinatorics and probabilistic algorithms and methods. From 1977 to 1981 he was a Sloan Research Fellow . In 1994 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich ( Probabilistic methods in combinatorics ). In 1984 he received the Lester Randolph Ford Award . He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .

From 1987 to 1989 he had a math column ( Brain Bogglers ) in Discover magazine (as Maxwell Carver ).

Fonts

with Paul Erdős: Probabilistic methods in combinatorial mathematics, Academic Press, Akademiai Kiado 1974
with Paul Erdős, Noga Alon : The probabilistic method, Wiley 1992, 3rd edition 2008
Ten lectures on the probabilistic method, SIAM 1987, 2nd edition 1994
with Ronald Graham , BL Rothschild Ramsey Theory , Wiley, 2nd edition 1990
The strange logic of random graphs, Springer 2001

personal data
SURNAME	Spencer, Joel H.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician and computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH	April 20, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH	Brooklyn