William "Red" Alford

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W. R. (Red) Alford
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Red Alford
Alford at the SERMON '99 conference
Born
William Robert Alford

July 21, 1937 (1937-07-21)
DiedMay 29, 2003 (2003-05-30) (aged 65)
Occupation(s)Mathematician, lawyer

William Robert "Red" Alford (July 21, 1937 – May 29, 2003) was an American mathematician and lawyer, who was best known for his work in the fields of topology and number theory.

Personal life

Alford was born in

The Citadel
(1959).

Subsequently, he earned his

Ph.D in mathematics from Tulane University (1963),[1] and his J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law
(1976).

After earning his J.D., he practiced law in Athens, Georgia, before returning to the mathematics faculty at the University of Georgia. He retired in 2002, and died the next year from a brain tumor.[2]

Mathematics

Alford's dissertation at Tulane was entitled: Some Wild Embeddings of the One and Two Dimensional Spheres in the Three Sphere.[3]

In 1994, in a paper with

Carmichael numbers[4] based on a conjecture given by Paul Erdős
.

MathSciNet credits Alford with eleven publications, of which two were in the prestigious Annals of Mathematics - the Carmichael numbers paper, and a 1970 paper in knot theory. [1][4]

References

  1. ^ a b William "Red" Alford at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Obituary, numbertheory.org. Accessed March 9, 2024.
  3. ^ "Some wild embeddings of the one and two dimensional spheres in the three sphere". digitallibrary.tulane.edu. October 19, 2023. Retrieved 19 October 2023.
  4. ^ a b W. R. Alford, A. Granville, and C. Pomerance. "There are Infinitely Many Carmichael Numbers." (PostScript) Annals of Mathematics 139 (1994) 703-722.

External links