Richard K. Guy Explained

Richard K. Guy
Birth Name:Richard Kenneth Guy
Birth Date:1916 9, df=yes
Birth Place:Nuneaton, England
Nationality:British/Canadian
Death Place:Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Field:Mathematics
Work Institutions:University of Calgary
Alma Mater:Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
(B.A. in 1938, M.A. in 1941)
Known For:Recreational mathematics
Strong law of small numbers
Unistable polyhedron
Prizes:Lester R. Ford Award (1989)

Richard Kenneth Guy (30 September 1916 – 9 March 2020) was a British mathematician. He was a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calgary.[1] He is known for his work in number theory, geometry, recreational mathematics, combinatorics, and graph theory.[2] [3] He is best known for co-authorship (with John Conway and Elwyn Berlekamp) of Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and authorship of Unsolved Problems in Number Theory.[4] He published more than 300 scholarly articles.[5] Guy proposed the partially tongue-in-cheek "strong law of small numbers", which says there are not enough small integers available for the many tasks assigned to them – thus explaining many coincidences and patterns found among numerous cultures.[6] For this paper he received the MAA Lester R. Ford Award.[7]

Biography

Early life

Guy was born 30 September 1916 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, to Adeline Augusta Tanner and William Alexander Charles Guy. Both of his parents were teachers, rising to the rank of headmistress and headmaster, respectively. He attended Warwick School for Boys, the third oldest school in Britain, but was not enthusiastic about most of the curriculum. He was good at sports and excelled in mathematics. At the age of 17 he read Dickson's History of the Theory of Numbers. He said it was better than "the whole works of Shakespeare", solidifying his lifelong interest in mathematics.[8]

In 1935 Guy entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as a result of winning several scholarships. To win the most important of these he had to travel to Cambridge and write exams for two days. His interest in games began while at Cambridge where he became an avid composer of chess problems.[9] In 1938, he was graduated with a second-class honours degree; he would later state that his failure to get a first may have been related to his obsession with chess.[10] Although his parents strongly advised against it, Guy decided to become a teacher and got a teaching diploma at the University of Birmingham. He met his future wife, Nancy Louise Thirian, through her brother Michael, who was a fellow scholarship winner at Gonville and Caius. He and Louise shared loves of mountain climbing and dancing. They married in December 1940.

War years

In November 1942, Guy received an emergency commission in the Meteorological Branch of the Royal Air Force, with the rank of flight lieutenant. He was posted to Reykjavík, and later to Bermuda, as a meteorologist. He tried to get permission for Louise to join him but was refused. While in Iceland, he did some glacier travel, skiing, and mountain climbing, marking the beginning of another long love affair, this one with snow and ice.[11] When Guy returned to England after the war, he went back to teaching, this time at Stockport Grammar School, but stayed only two years. In 1947 the family moved to London, where he got a job teaching mathematics at Goldsmiths' College.[12]

Later life and death

In 1951 he moved to Singapore, where he taught at the University of Malaya until 1962. He then spent a few years at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India. While they were in India, he and Louise went mountaineering in the foothills of the Himalayas.[13] Guy moved to Canada in 1965, settling down at the University of Calgary in Alberta, where he obtained a professorship.[14] [15] Although he officially retired in 1982, he still went to the office five days a week to work, even as he passed the age of 100.[16] Along with George Thomas and John Selfridge, Guy taught at Canada/USA Mathcamp during its early years.

In 1991 the University of Calgary awarded him an honorary doctorate. Guy said that they gave him the degree out of embarrassment, although the university stated that "his extensive research efforts and prolific writings in the field of number theory and combinatorics have added much to the underpinnings of game theory and its extensive application to many forms of human activity."[17] Guy and his wife Louise (who died in 2010) remained very committed to mountain hiking and environmentalism even in their later years. In 2014, he donated $100,000 to the Alpine Club of Canada for the training of amateur leaders.[18] In turn, the Alpine Club has honoured them by building the Louise and Richard Guy Hut near the base of Mont des Poilus.[19] They had three children, among them computer scientist and mathematician Michael J. T. Guy.

Guy died on 9 March 2020 at the age of 103.[20] [21]

Mathematics

While teaching in Singapore in 1960 Guy met the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. Erdős was noted for posing and solving difficult mathematical problems and shared several of them with Guy.[22] Guy later recalled "I made some progress in each of them. This gave me encouragement, and I began to think of myself as possibly being something of a research mathematician, which I hadn't done before."[23] Eventually he wrote four papers with Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 1,[24] and solved one of Erdős' problems.[25] Guy was intrigued by unsolved problems and wrote two books devoted to them.[26] [27] Many number theorists got their start trying to solve problems from Guy's book Unsolved problems in number theory.[28]

Guy described himself as an amateur mathematician,[29] although his work was widely respected by professionals.[30] In a career that spans eight decades he wrote or co-authored more than a dozen books and collaborated with some of the most important mathematicians of the twentieth century.[31] Paul Erdős, John H. Conway, Donald Knuth, and Martin Gardner were among his collaborators, as were Elwyn Berlekamp, John L. Selfridge, Kenneth Falconer, Frank Harary, Lee Sallows, Gerhard Ringel, Béla Bollobás, C. B. Lacampagne, Bruce Sagan, and Neil Sloane.[32]

Over the course of his career Guy published more than 100 research papers in mathematics, including four with Erdős.[33] [34] [35] [36] [37]

Guy was influential in the field of recreational mathematics. He collaborated with Berlekamp and Conway on two volumes of Winning Ways, which Martin Gardner described in 1998 as "the greatest contribution to recreational mathematics in this century".[38] [39] Guy was considered briefly as a replacement for Gardner when the latter retired from the Mathematical Games column at Scientific American.[40] Guy conducted extensive research on Conway's Game of Life, and in 1970, discovered the game's glider.[41] [42] Around 1968, Guy discovered a unistable polyhedron with 19 faces; no such construct with fewer faces was found until 2012. As of 2016 Guy still was active in conducting mathematical work.[43] To mark his 100th birthday friends and colleagues organised a celebration of his life and a tribute song and video was released by Gathering 4 Gardner.[44]

Guy was one of the original directors of the Number Theory Foundation and played an active role in supporting their efforts to "foster a spirit of cooperation and goodwill among the family of number theorists" for more than twenty years.[45] [46]

Chess problems

From 1947 to 1951 Guy was the endings editor for British Chess Magazine.[47] He is known for almost 200 endgame studies. Along with Hugh Blandford and John Roycroft, he is one of the inventors of the GBR code (Guy–Blandford–Roycroft code), a system of representing the position of chess pieces on a chessboard. Publications including EG use it to classify endgame types and to index endgame studies.[48]

Solution:1. Kd1 Ka32. Kc1 a53. h4 a44. h5 Ka25. h6 a36. h7 Ka17. h8=N a28. Ng6 fxg69. f7 g510. f8=N g411. Ne6 dxe612. d7 e513. d8=N e414. Nc6 bxc615. b7 c516. Kd1 Kb217. b8=Q+ 1-0

Selected publications

Books

Papers

Sources

External links

Notes and References

  1. Albers & Alexanderson (2011) p. 320
  2. MMA (2016)
  3. Author biography from Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, Vol. I, 2nd ed., AK Peters, 2001.
  4. Roberts (2016)
  5. Scott (2012) p. 29
  6. Guy . Richard K. . Richard K. Guy. October 1988 . The Strong Law of Small Numbers . Am. Math. Mon.. 95 . 8 . 697–712 . 0002-9890 . 10.2307/2322249. 2322249 .
  7. MMA (2016)
  8. Scott (2012) p. 6
  9. Roberts (2016)
  10. Albers & Alexanderson (2011) p. 169
  11. Scott (2012) p. 29: Richard has often told me that he has had three loves in his life: Louise and mountains of course are two of them, but his first love was mathematics.
  12. Scott (2012) p. 11
  13. Guiltenane (2016)
  14. University of Calgary (2016)
  15. Roberts (2016)
  16. Guiltenane (2016): Guy has said, "I didn't retire, they just stopped paying me."
  17. Scott (2012) p. 31
  18. Scott (2012) p. 39
  19. Web site: Introducing the Louise & Richard Guy Hut. ((Alpine Club of Canada)). 30 October 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20161011035113/http://www.alpineclubofcanada.ca/blog/the-richard-louise-guy-hut/. 11 October 2016.
  20. Web site: Remembering Richard Guy: 1916-2020 . . 10 March 2020 . 10 March 2020 .
  21. Web site: Canadian Climbing Legend Richard Guy Dies at 103. Gripped. 10 March 2020.
  22. Roberts (2016)
  23. Albers & Alexanderson (2011) p. 176
  24. https://files.oakland.edu/users/grossman/enp/Erdos0.html Coauthors of Paul Erdos
  25. Web site: Math genius left unclaimed sum . Edmonton Journal . Wittmeier. Brent. 2010-09-28 . 2023-12-31.
  26. Unsolved problems in number theory and Unsolved problems in combinatorial games
  27. Albers (2011): p. 165
  28. Scott (2016) p. 30: It is no exaggeration to say that Unsolved Problems in Number Theory has inspired generations of aspiring Number Theorists!
  29. Scot (2012) p. 29
  30. Roberts (2016): "He pushes the boundaries of that definition."
  31. Scott (2016)
  32. Albers (2011)
  33. Web site: Richard K. Guy. American Mathematical Society. Mathematical Reviews. 13 March 2020.
  34. P. Erdős. R. K. Guy. J. L. Selfridge. Another property of 239 and some related questions. Congr. Numer.. 34. 1982. 243–257. 681710.
  35. P. Erdős. R. K. Guy. J. W. Moon. On refining partitions. J. London Math. Soc.. 9. 1974. 565–570. 360302.
  36. P. Erdős. R. K. Guy. Crossing number problems. Amer. Math. Monthly. 80. 1973. 52–58. 10.1080/00029890.1973.11993230. 382006.
  37. P. Erdős. R. K. Guy. Distinct distances between lattice points. Elem. Math.. 25. 1970. 121–123. 281691.
  38. A Quarter-Century of Recreational Mathematics by Martin Gardner, Scientific American, August 1998
  39. Scott (2016) p. 30: Mathematician Michael Bennett calls Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays the bible of Combinatorial Game Theory.
  40. Mulcahy (2016): Richard also reveals a little known fact about the end of Gardner's quarter-century column run for that publication, "There was serious consideration given to my taking over the column from him. I'm glad that it didn't happen, because you can't follow Martin Gardner!".
  41. Mulcahy (2016)
  42. Gardner, Martin (1970). The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life" Scientific American: Mathematical Games. October 1970.
  43. Web site: Richard Guy at 100. Kenneth Falconer. London Mathematical Society Newsletter. 3 October 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20171229172400/http://newsletter.lms.ac.uk/richard-guy-at-100/. 29 December 2017.
  44. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RAalmbDGxM Richard Guy 100th Birthday Tribute Song
  45. Web site: Chair's Corner. William Blair. NIU Department of Mathematical Sciences Newsletter. University of Northern Illinois. 13 March 2020.
  46. Web site: In Memoriam. The Number Theory Foundation. Number Theory Foundation. 10 March 2020.
  47. https://books.google.com/books?id=3j4fDQAAQBAJ&q=R.+K.+Guy&pg=PA115 The Chess Endgame Study: A Comprehensive Introduction
  48. Hooper, David; Whyld, Kenneth (1992) The Oxford Companion to Chess, "GBR code", p. 353, Oxford University Press,

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