Richard Alejandro Arratia is a mathematician noted for his work in
combinatorics and
probability theory
Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set ...
.
Contributions
Arratia developed the ideas of
interlace polynomials 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 Pa ...
and Gregory Sorkin,
[.] found an equivalent formulation of the
Stanley–Wilf conjecture as the convergence of a limit,
and was the first to investigate the lengths of
superpattern In the mathematical study of permutations and permutation patterns, a superpattern or universal permutation is a permutation that contains all of the patterns of a given length. More specifically, a ''k''-superpattern contains all possible patterns ...
s of permutations.
He has also written highly cited papers on the
Chen–Stein method on distances between
probability distributions,
[.][.] on
random walk
In mathematics, a random walk is a random process that describes a path that consists of a succession of random steps on some mathematical space.
An elementary example of a random walk is the random walk on the integer number line \mathbb Z ...
s with exclusion,
[.] and on
sequence alignment.
[.][.]
He is a coauthor of the book ''Logarithmic Combinatorial Structures: A Probabilistic Approach''.
[.]
Education and employment
Arratia earned his Ph.D. in 1979 from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...
under the supervision of David Griffeath. He is currently a professor of mathematics at the
University of Southern California
, mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it"
, religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist
, established =
, accreditation = WSCUC
, type = Private research university
, academic_affiliations =
, endowment = $8.1 ...
.
Faculty listing
USC Mathematics, retrieved 2013-06-01.
Selected publications
;Research papers
;Books
References
External links
*
USC faculty page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Arratia, Richard Alejandro
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
Combinatorialists
Probability theorists
Stuyvesant High School alumni
University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni
University of Southern California faculty