Víctor Neumann-Lara (1933–2004) was a Mexican

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and a pioneer in the field of

graph theory In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of ''graph (discrete mathematics), graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of ''Vertex (graph ...

Mexico Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...

. His work also covers

general topology In mathematics, general topology (or point set topology) is the branch of topology that deals with the basic set-theoretic definitions and constructions used in topology. It is the foundation of most other branches of topology, including differ ...

game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions. It has applications in many fields of social science, and is used extensively in economics, logic, systems science and computer science. Initially, game theory addressed ...

and

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many ...

Biography

Born in the city of

cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...

, Hidalgo,

, he soon moved to

Mexico City Mexico City is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Mexico, largest city of Mexico, as well as the List of North American cities by population, most populous city in North America. It is one of the most important cultural and finan ...

, where he received his bachelor's degree in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

from the School of Sciences,

UNAM The National Autonomous University of Mexico (, UNAM) is a public research university in Mexico. It has several campuses in Mexico City, and many others in various locations across Mexico, as well as a presence in nine countries. It also has 34 ...

. His life was greatly devoted to teaching, giving over 100 courses in Mexico and around the world, and introducing new

teaching method A teaching method is a set of principles and methods used by teachers to enable student learning. These strategies are determined partly by the subject matter to be taught, partly by the relative expertise of the learners, and partly by constrai ...

s. He carried color chalks with him all the time, and was prompt to give graphic explanations.

Work

Full Professor at the Institute of Mathematics,

, he directed over 15 theses and taught both in the Institute and in the Faculty of Sciences. Below is a selection of his multiple publications, which earned him over 120 citations from renowned mathematicians in the area of graph theory. In 1982 he introduced the notion of a dichromatic number of a

digraph Digraph, often misspelled as diagraph, may refer to: * Digraph (orthography), a pair of characters used together to represent a single sound, such as "nq" in Hmong RPA * Ligature (writing), the joining of two letters as a single glyph, such as " ...

, which would eventually be used in kernel theory and

tournament theory Tournament theory is the theory in personnel economics used to describe certain situations where wage differences are based not on marginal productivity but instead upon relative differences between the individuals. This theory was invented by econ ...

Selected publications

* Francisco Larrión, Víctor Neumann-Lara, Miguel A. Pizaña, Thomas Dale Porter "A hierarchy of self-clique graphs" ''

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 f ...

'' 282(1–3): 193–208 (2004) * M. E. Frías-Armenta, Víctor Neumann-Lara, Miguel A. Pizaña "Dismantlings and iterated clique graphs" ''Discrete Mathematics'' 282(1–3): 263–265 (2004) * Xueliang Li, Víctor Neumann-Lara, Eduardo Rivera-Campo "On a tree graph defined by a set of cycles" ''Discrete Mathematics'' 271(1–3): 303–310 (2003) * Juan José Montellano-Ballesteros, Víctor Neumann-Lara "An Anti-Ramsey Theorem" ''Combinatorica'' 22(3): 445–449 (2002) * Francisco Larrión, Víctor Neumann-Lara "On clique divergent graphs with linear growth" ''Discrete Mathematics'' 245(1–3): 139–153 (2002) * Francisco Larrión, Víctor Neumann-Lara, Miguel A. Pizaña "Whitney triangulations, local girth and iterated clique graphs" ''Discrete Mathematics'' 258(1–3): 123–135 (2002) * Francisco Larrión, Víctor Neumann-Lara, Miguel A. Pizaña "On the homotopy type of the clique graph" ''J. Braz. Comp. Soc.'' 7(3): 69–73 (2001) * Francisco Larrión, Víctor Neumann-Lara "Locally C6 graphs are clique divergent" ''Discrete Mathematics'' 215: 159–170 (2000) * Manuel Abellanas, G. Hernandez, Rolf Klein, Víctor Neumann-Lara, Jorge Urrutia "A Combinatorial Property of Convex Sets" ''Discrete & Computational Geometry'' 17(3): 307–318 (1997) * Manuel Abellanas, G. Hernandez, Rolf Klein, Víctor Neumann-Lara, Jorge Urrutia "Voronoi Diagrams and Containment of Families of Convex Sets on the Plane" ''Symposium on Computational Geometry'' 71–78 (1995) * Jorge L. Arocha, Javier Bracho, Víctor Neumann-Lara "Tight and Untight Triangulations of Surfaces by Complete Graphs" ''J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B'' 63(2): 185–199 (1995) * Víctor Neumann-Lara, Eduardo Rivera-Campo "Spanning trees with bounded degrees" ''Combinatorica'' 11(1): 55–61 (1991) * Roland Häggkvist,

Pavol Hell Pavol Hell is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, born in Czechoslovakia. He is a professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University. Hell started his mathematical studies at Charles University in Prague, and moved to Canada in ...

, Donald J. Miller, Víctor Neumann-Lara "On multiplicative graphs and the product conjecture" ''Combinatorica'' 8(1): 63–74 (1988) * Víctor Neumann-Lara, H. Galeana-Sánchez "On kernel-perfect critical digraphs" ''Discrete Math.'' 59: 257–265 (1986) * Víctor Neumann-Lara, N. Santorro, Jorge Urrutia "Uniquely colourable m-dichromatic oriented graphs" ''Discrete Math.'' 62: 65–70 (1986) * Víctor Neumann-Lara, Luis Montejano "A variation of Menger's theorem for long paths" ''J. Combin. Theory Ser. B'' 36: 213–217 (1984) * Víctor Neumann-Lara, Jorge Urrutia "Vertex critical r-dichromatic tournaments" ''Discrete Math.'' 49: 83–87 (1984) * Víctor Neumann-Lara, H. Galeana-Sanchez "On kernels and semikernels of digraphs" ''Discrete Math.'' 48: 67–76 (1984) * Víctor Neumann-Lara "The dichromatic number of a digraph" ''J. Combin. Theory Ser. B'' 33: 265–270 (1982) * Víctor Neumann-Lara "k-Hamiltonian graphs with given girth" ''Colloq. Math. Soc. János Bolyai'' 10: 1133–1142 (1975)

References

A short biography in Spanish

External links

Graph Theory white pages
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Neumann-Lara, Victor 1933 births 2004 deaths 20th-century Mexican mathematicians Graph theorists Topologists National Autonomous University of Mexico alumni Mexican people of German-Jewish descent

Mexican Jews The history of the Jews in Mexico began in 1519 with the arrival of ''Conversos'', often called ''Marranos'' or "Crypto-Jews", referring to those Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism and that then became subject to the Spanish Inquisition. D ...

People from Huejutla de Reyes Academic staff of the National Autonomous University of Mexico