Frank Garvan
Francis G. Garvan (born March 9, 1955) is an Australian-born mathematician who specializes in number theory and combinatorics. He holds the position Professor of Mathematics at the University of Florida.[1] He received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University (January, 1986) with George E. Andrews as his thesis advisor.[2] Garvan's thesis, Generalizations of Dyson's rank, concerned the rank of a partition[3] and formed the groundwork for several of his later papers.[4]
Garvan is well-known for his work in the fields of q-series and integer partitions. Most famously, in 1988, Garvan and Andrews discovered a definition of the crank of a partition.[5] The crank of a partition is an elusive combinatorial statistic similar to the rank of a partition which provides a key to the study of Ramanujan congruences in partition theory. It was first described by Freeman Dyson in a paper on ranks for the journal Eureka in 1944[6]. Andrews and Garvan's definition was the first definition of a crank to satisfy the properties hypothesized for it in Dyson's paper.
References
- "CURRICULUM VITAE: Francis G. Garvan" (PDF). qseries.org. July 18, 2016. Retrieved 2019-04-07.
- "George Andrews' Students". sites.math.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2019-04-07.
- Garvan, Francis G. (May 1986). "1". Generalizations of Dyson's rank (Thesis). Retrieved 2019-03-22.
- Garvan, Francis G. "Frank Garvan: List of Publications". Retrieved 22 March 2019.
- Askey, Richard. "THE WORK OF GEORGE ANDREWS: A MADISON PERSPECTIVE" (PDF). emis.ams.org. Retrieved 2019-04-07.
- Dyson, Freeman J. (1944). "Some Guesses in The Theory of Partitions". Eureka (Cambridge). 8: 10–15.