Combinatorics

• Arie Bialostocki
Arie Bialostocki is one of 507 mathematicians in the world that have Erdos number 1, i.e., collaborated with the most prolific mathematician of all times, Paul Erdos. He received his Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University in Israel in group theory, an area that has applications to crystallography and several branches of physics. Some groups known as B-injectors are named after him. In his later career, he moved to a wide range of problems in different areas of discrete mathematics known as Erdos type problems, ranging from combinatorial geometry to combinatorial number theory. During his stay at the University of Idaho he has supervised six Ph.D. students, five of which hold positions in colleges in the north-west and the sixth works for a hi-tech company in California. In recent years Arie has been involved in an area known as additive number theory. He wrote a survey on the Erdos-Ginzburg-Ziv theorem for the Encyclopedia of mathematics published by Elsevier, and was solicited by Springer-Verlag to write a problem book in his area. During the last five years Arie added to his interests undergraduate education and research. He was the P.I. of a very prestigious REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program supported by the NSF and the UI. This program attracted some of the most brilliant undergraduate mathematics majors in the US, from schools such as Harvard, Yale, M.I.T and Berkeley. Arie was an invited speaker at an international conference in Italy, where he was among the twenty invited speakers. Other invited speakers included mathematicians from Cambridge and Oxford and the field medallist John Thompson.
• Hunter Snevily
After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana, Hunter Snevily was a visiting scholar at Cal-Tech, working with Professor R. Wilson, a world leader in Combinatorics. Among his early works he dealt with "the snake in the box problem" that is a problem in coding theory with applications to telecommunications. Among many of his other contributions to combinatorics is a generalization of Fisher's Inequality in the area of block designs investigated by both mathematicians and statisticians. Recently, he has further generalized the above result, proving a theorem in extremal set theory, which yields a generalization of a 1952 theorem and has application to the area of graph decomposition. Because of this contribution Hunter Snevily has gained a worldwide recognition. In his research he uses state of the art techniques, namely, application of algebraic methods to combinatorial problems.
• Hong Wang
Hong Wang is a prolific mathematician and a world authority in two classical areas in graph theory, edge-packing and vertex-covering of dense graphs. Both areas are closely related to computer science and computer engineering. First, many computer scientists are interested in efficient algorithms for the above packing and covering problems, and since many of Wang's proofs are constructive, they provide an algorithmic approach to these problems. Second, the above problems are of interest for computer engineers who work in the areas of networking and the designing of VLSI. Among his other interests, is combinatorial optimization, known for its application to management and scheduling problems in industry.