Richard Kenneth Guy
Richard Kenneth Guy (born September 30, 1916 in Nuneaton , Warwickshire , † March 9, 2020 in Calgary ) was a British-Canadian mathematician . He was a professor at the University of Calgary .
Life
Guy studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge (bachelor's degree in 1938, master's degree in 1941), served as a captain in the Royal Air Force and was deployed in the Air Ministry's weather service. From 1941 to 1949 he was a professor at Goldsmiths College and then taught at Malaya University in Singapore . From 1956 he was a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi . From 1962 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Calgary . In 1972 he became a Canadian citizen.
mathematician
He came into the focus of a broader public primarily as the author of three books: Unsolved Problems in Number Theory and Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays (with John Horton Conway and Elwyn Berlekamp ) and The Book of Numbers (German title Zahlenzauber, with John Horton Conway) . In addition, he has published over 200 academic articles and books on the topics of combinatorial game theory , number theory and graph theory .
Around 1968 he discovered what was then the smallest known polyhedron with 19 faces on just one side . In Conway's Game of Life , he discovered the glider.
Chess composition
Guy is known to chess players for his approximately 200 studies of endgames and for co-inventing the GBR Code . For the British Chess Magazine he was from 1947 to 1951 responsible editor for finals.
Le Problème, 1938
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Solution:
1. Ke1 – d1 Ka4 – a3
2. Kd1 – c1 a6 – a5
3. h3 – h4 a5 – a4
4. h4 – h5 Ka3 – a2
5. h5 – h6 a4 – a3
6. h6 – h7 Ka2 – a1
7. h7 – h8S sub-transformation a3 – a2
8. Nh8 – g6 f7xg6
9. f6 – f7 g6 – g5
10. f7 – f8S sub-transformation g5 – g4
11. Nf8 – e6 d7xe6
12. d6 – d7 e6 – e5
13. d7– D8S underpromotion e5-e4
14 SD8-c6 b7xc6
15. b6-b7 c6-c5
16 Kc 1-d1 Ka1-b2
17. b7-b8D + wins
Oddities
Around his 80th birthday in 1996, when Guy was working on The Book of Numbers with his mathematician colleague John Horton Conway, Conway bet him that there would be no more complete factorization of a Fermat number within the next 20 Years would be discovered. The bet was $ 20. Seventeen years later, in 2013, Guy, who was convinced that a Fermat number would very well be factored in full, made a desperate appeal to various relevant Internet sites to intensify the search for Fermat number factors. One month before the end of the 20 years, on August 29, 2016, he started another cry for help, but it faded, although Guy would have been willing to share the 20 dollars with the discoverer of a full factorization. Nobody could completely factor a new Fermat number, even if many other Fermat numbers could be partially factored. Guy lost his $ 20 to Conway.
Works
- Unsolved Problems in Number Theory. 1994, ISBN 0-387-94289-0 .
- With John Conway, Elwyn Berlekamp: Winning. Braunschweig 1985/86, 4 volumes, ISBN 3-528-08531-2 , ISBN 3-528-08532-0 , ISBN 3-528-08533-9 , ISBN 3-528-08534-7 (original: Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays. 2 volumes, ISBN 0-12-091101-9 , ISBN 0-12-091102-7 ).
- With John Conway: Magic Numbers. Of natural, imaginary and other numbers. Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-7643-5244-2 (Original: The Book of Numbers. New York 1996, ISBN 0-387-97993-X ).
- With Hallard Croft, Kenneth J. Falconer : Unsolved problems in geometry. Springer Verlag, 1994.
literature
- John Roycroft : Richard Guy's Chess Endgame Studies. Prime Actions, Kenneth Solja, Helsinki 1996. ISBN 951-96771-3-5 .
- Donald J. Albers, Gerald L. Alexanderson: Fascinating Mathematical People. Interviews and Memoirs. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Web links
- Literature by and about Richard Kenneth Guy in the catalog of the German National Library
- Web presence
- Some compositions by Richard Kenneth Guy on the PDB server
Individual evidence
- ↑ Richard K. Guy (1916-2020). Retrieved March 10, 2020 .
- ↑ Distributed Search for Fermat Number Divisors. August 29th, 2016. A Desperate appeal !! by Richard K. Guy. Retrieved October 13, 2016 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Guy, Richard Kenneth |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 30, 1916 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nuneaton , UK |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 9, 2020 |
| Place of death | Calgary , Canada |