Neil Robertson (mathematician)

Neil Robertson
Born	November 30, 1938 Canada
Residence	United States, Canada
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	The Ohio State University
Alma mater	University of Waterloo, 1969
Doctoral advisor	William Tutte
Doctoral students	Kamal Chakravarti Bogdan Oporowski
Known for	Robertson–Seymour theorem
Notable awards	Pólya Prize (SIAM) (2004, 2006)

G. Neil Robertson (born 1938) is a mathematician working mainly in topological graph theory, currently a distinguished professor^[1] at the Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Waterloo under his doctoral advisor William Tutte. According to the criteria of the Erdős Number Project, Dr. Robertson has an Erdős number of 3, but it can be lowered to 2 if an obituary he coauthored with Arthur M. Hobbs is counted.^[2]

Biography

In 1969, Robertson joined the faculty of The Ohio State University, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1972 and Professor in 1984. He was a consultant with Bell Communications Research from 1984 to 1996. He has held visiting faculty positions in many institutions, most extensively at Princeton University from 1996 to 2001, and most recently at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 2002.

Conferences

Invited or contributed presentations

• One week lecture series at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire: On the proof of the 4-color theorem, 2 hour lectures, and On the proof of the graph minor theorem, 2 hour lectures, November, 1994.
• AMS meeting at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida: Binary matroids of branch-width three, 20 minutes, March 1995.
• The R. C. Bose Memorial conference, Fort Collins, Colorado: The four-color theorem, 36 minutes, June 1995.
• The third Slovene international conference in graph theory, Bled, Slovenia: Results and problems about representativity of graph embeddings, 50 minutes, June 1995.
• The AMS, IMS, Siam Joint Summer Research Conference, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington: Binary matroids of branch-width three, 45 minutes, July 1995.
• AMS meeting in Guanajuato, Mexico: Planar graphs on nonplanar surfaces", 20 minutes, November 1995.
• Some thoughts on Hadwiger's Conjecture. June 28, 1999.

Video

• Short conference video. Neil Robertson - Some thoughts on Hadwiger's Conjecture. June 28, 1999. Video produced by Bojan Mohar.

Theorem proofs

• Four color theorem (Full text)
• Robertson–Seymour theorem (Wagner's Conjecture)
• Hadwiger conjecture (graph theory)
• Strong Perfect Graph Theorem

Prizes

1. Fulkerson Prize (1994, 2006, 2009)^[3]
2. Pólya Prize (SIAM) (2004)
3. Distinguished Scholar Award (OSU) (1997)
4. Alumni Achievement Medal (Waterloo) (2002)

References

1. ^ [1] Neil Robertson awarded the title of Distinguished Professor
2. ^ Collaboration Distance report from MathSciNet, Retrieved September 21, 2006.
3. ^ [2] Fulkerson Prize Winners

External links

• Neil Robertson's homepage at Ohio State University

Persondata
Name	Robertson, Neil
Alternative names
Short description	American mathematician
Date of birth	December, 1938
Place of birth	Canada
Date of death
Place of death