Graham Brightwell is a British mathematician working in the field of

discrete mathematics Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a bijection with the set of natural numbers) rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous ...

. Currently a professor at the London School of Economics, he has published nearly 100 papers in

pure mathematics Pure mathematics is the study of mathematical concepts independently of any application outside mathematics. These concepts may originate in real-world concerns, and the results obtained may later turn out to be useful for practical applications ...

, including over a dozen with

Béla Bollobás Béla Bollobás FRS (born 3 August 1943) is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul E ...

. His research interests include random combinatorial structures; partially ordered sets;

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing c ...

;

random graphs In mathematics, random graph is the general term to refer to probability distributions over graphs. Random graphs may be described simply by a probability distribution, or by a random process which generates them. The theory of random graphs li ...

;

and

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of ''graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conn ...

. (Bollobás supervised his PhD on "Linear Extensions of Partially Ordered Sets" at

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge becam ...

, awarded 1988.)

Othello

Brightwell started playing

Othello ''Othello'' (full title: ''The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice'') is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, probably in 1603, set in the contemporary Ottoman–Venetian War (1570–1573) fought for the control of the Island of Cypru ...

in 1985, after finding himself sharing an apartment with fellow mathematician and Othello player

Imre Leader Imre Bennett Leader is a British Othello player, employed as a professor of pure mathematics at Cambridge University. As a child, he was a pupil at the private St Paul's School and won a silver medal on the British team at the 1981 Internatio ...

. He has finished three times as runner-up in the World Othello Championship and is a 5-time British Champion, and has served as chairman of the British Othello Federation and as editor of the British Othello Newsletter. He created the Brightwell Quotient, often used in Othello tournaments, to resolve ties.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brightwell, Graham 1962 births Alumni of the University of Cambridge 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Reversi players Combinatorialists Academics of the London School of Economics Living people