MYSTERIES OF THE EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE - HIKARI Ltd

178 Biographical Vignettes
Vignette 39 (Solomon Wolf Golomb: 1932-).
Solomon W. Golomb, Mathematician and engineer, was born in Baltimore,
Maryland [330]. He received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1951 and his
M.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1957) in Mathematics from Harvard, where he wrote
the thesis Problems in the Distribution of Prime Numbers under the supervision
of D. V. Widder. He has worked at the Glenn L. Martin Company, where
he became interested in communications theory and began working on shift
register sequences, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech. In 1963,
he joined the faculty of University of Southern California, where he remains
today, with a joint appointment in the Departments of Electrical Engineering
and Mathematics. His research has been specialized in combinatorial analysis,
number theory, coding theory and communications. Today, millions of cordless
and cellular phones rely upon his fundamental work on shift register sequences.
However, he is best known as the inventor of Polyominoes (1953), the inspiration
for the computer game Tetris. His other contributions to Recreational
Mathematics include the theory of Rep-tiles (Recreation 15) and Hexiamonds
(Recreation 16). He has been a regular columnist in Scientific American, IEEE
Information Society Newsletter and Johns Hopkins Magazine. He has been the
recipient of the NSA Research Medal, the Lomonosov and Kapitsa Medals of
the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Richard W. Hamming Medal of the
IEEE. He is also a Fellow of both IEEE and AAAS as well as a member of the
National Academy of Engineering.
Vignette 40 (Ronald Lewis Graham: 1935-).
Ron Graham was born in Taft, California and spent his childhood moving
back and forth between there and Georgia, eventually settling in Florida
[230]. He then entered University of Chicago on a three year Ford Foundation
scholarship at age 15 without graduating from high school. It is here that he
learnt gymnastics and became proficient at juggling and the trampoline. Without
graduating, he spent the next year at University of California at Berkeley
studying electrical engineering before enlisting for four years in the Air Force.
During these years of service, he earned a B.S. in Physics from University of
Alaska. After his discharge, he returned to UC-Berkeley where he completed
his Ph.D. under D.H. Lehmer in 1962 with the thesis On Finite Sums of Rational
Numbers. He then joined the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories
where he worked on problems in Discrete Mathematics, specifically scheduling
theory, computational geometry, Ramsey theory and quasi-randomness.
(Here, he became Bell Labs and New Jersey ping-pong champion.) In 1963,
he began his long collaboration with Paul Erdös which eventually led to 30
joint publications and his invention of the “Erdös number”. His contributions
to partitioning an equilateral triangle have been described in Property 80 of
Chapter 2. In 1977, he entered the Guinness Book of Records for what is now