Gabriel Andrew Dirac

Gabriel Andrew Dirac (13 March 1925 – 20 July 1984) was a Hungarian/British mathematician who mainly worked in graph theory. He served as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin 1964-1966. In 1952, he gave a sufficient condition for a graph to contain a Hamiltonian circuit. The previous year, he conjectured that n points in the plane, not all collinear, must span at least [n/2] two-point lines, where [x] is the largest integer not exceeding x. This conjecture was proven true when n is sufficiently large by Green and Tao in 2012.[1]

Gabriel Andrew Dirac
Born(1925-03-13)March 13, 1925
Budapest
DiedJuly 20, 1984(1984-07-20) (aged 59)
Arlesheim
EducationPh.D.
Alma materUniversity of London
Known forGraph theory
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of Aarhus, Trinity College Dublin
Doctoral advisorRichard Rado

Education

Dirac started his studies at St John's College Cambridge in 1942, but by 1942 the war saw him serving in the aircraft industry. He received his MA in 1949, and moved to the University of London, getting his Ph.D. "On the Colouring of Graphs: Combinatorial topology of Linear Complexes" there under Richard Rado.[2]

Career

Dirac's main academic positions were at the University of Vienna (1954-1958), University of Hamburg (1958-1963), Trinity College Dublin (Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics, 1964-1966), University of Wales at Swansea (1967-1970). and Aarhus University (1970-1984).

Family

He was born Balázs Gábor in Budapest, to Richard Balazs and Margit "Manci" Wigner (sister of Eugene Wigner). When his mother married Paul Dirac in 1937, he and his sister resettled in England and were formally adopted, changing their family name to Dirac.

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See also
  • Dirac's theorem on Hamiltonian cycles
  • Dirac's theorem on chordal graphs
  • Dirac's theorem on cycles in k-connected graphs

Notes
  1. Green, Ben; Tao, Terence (2012-08-23). "On sets defining few ordinary lines". arXiv:1208.4714 [math.CO].
  2. Gabriel Andrew Dirac at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

References
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