Gabriel Andrew Dirac

Gabriel Andrew Dirac ( born March 13, 1925 in Budapest, † 20 July 1984 Arlesheim ) was a Hungarian- British mathematician who worked on graph theory.

Gabriel Dirac was the son of Eugene Paul Wigner's sister Margit from his first marriage. As this 1937 Paul Dirac married, also Gabriel and his sister Judith moved to England and also took the name of Dirac ( and British citizenship ). During the Second World War he worked in the aircraft industry. Dirac studied at Cambridge University and London University, where he received his doctorate in 1951 with Richard Rado ( On the Colouring of Graphs: Combinatorial topology of Linear Complexes ). In the same year he was awarded the Rayleigh Prize of the University of Cambridge. After that, he was at the University of London, Hamburg, Toronto, Dublin ( Trinity College), Vienna, Ilmenau, Swansea. 1966/67, and from 1970 he was a professor at the University of Aarhus.

Dirac was one of the leading graph theorists. In particular, he worked on graph colorings and related information via maps stains ( and the four-color problem). He found in 1952 a new necessary condition for the existence of Hamilton paths in graphs. In the same year he proved the Hajos conjecture for (generally it is wrong, however, as evidenced in 1979 by Paul Catlin ). He also studied number theory and geometry.

With his wife Rosemari Dirac he had four children.

He was one of the editors of the Journal of Graph Theory and the European Journal of Combinatorics. In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Remarks on the four color conjecture and the theory of graphs ).