Gerard Laman

Gerard Laman (born August 22, 1924), Dutch mathematician, worked on graph theory.

Gerard Laman was born in Leiden, The Netherlands. He completed high school studies at the Leids Gymnasium in 1942. His study of Mathematics at Leiden University was delayed by a period in hiding to evade enforced labor during the occupation of the Netherlands by Germany in the second world war. He completed Mathematics with a minor in mechanics in 1952. From 1949 onwards, he was a scientific assistant to Prof.dr. J. Haantjes.

With a stipend of the Dutch-Belgian Cultural Accord, he was privately taught in combinatorial topology of fibre spaces, in Brussels, Belgium by Prof.dr. G. Hirsch of the Agricultural University of Ghent in 1953.

From 1954 to 1957 he worked as a high school teacher of mathematics at the Delft high school 'Gemeentelijke Hogere Burgerschool HBS'.

In 1959 he completed his PhD thesis 'On automorphisms of transformationgroups of polynomal algebras'. Prof. dr. W.T. van Est of Leiden University acted as promotor, since the original promotor, Prof. Haantjes had passed away.

From 1957 to 1967 he worked as a lecturer at the Polytechnic High School of Eindhoven (now Technical University Eindhoven).

From 1967 to his retirement in 1989, he worked as a lecturer at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Amsterdam, teaching mathematics to students in Econometry. Gerard Laman regards himself mostly as a teacher of mathematics, where structuredness of thinking, as well as brevity in speech and writing are his forte.

His main scientific contribution is the 'Laman graph' (Laman, G. (1970), "On graphs and the rigidity of plane skeletal structures", J. Engineering Mathematics 4: 331–340). In graph theory, the Laman graphs are a family of sparse graphs describing the minimally rigid systems of rods and joints in the plane.

As Gerard Laman did not mind pointing out himself, his original publication in 1970 went largely unnoticed for a long time. Only when Prof. dr. Branko Grünbaum, Seattle, Washington, USA, together with Dr. G.C. Shephard, included it in his series of 'Lectures on lost mathematics', did this work receive some more attention in the mathematical community (Book: Lectures on Lost Mathematicsby B. Grünbaum and G.C. Shephard, American Mathematical Association, 1978).

Towards the end of his life, Gerard Laman worked on the challenge to lift the original 'Laman graph' from the two dimensions of its original description to three dimensions, inspired by a simple counter example, the 'double banana graph'.