Ernst G. Straus

Ernst Gabor Straus ( born February 25, 1922 in Munich, † July 12, 1983 in Los Angeles ) was a German - American mathematician who, among other things with Combinatorics ( extremal graph theory, Euclidean Ramsey theory ), theoretical physics and calculus employed. He has published, among others, together with Albert Einstein and Paul Erdős (that He wears the Erdős number 1).

Straus was born as the youngest of five children of the lawyer Elias Straus and the doctor and suffragist Rahel Straus ( born Goitein ) and became familiar with early mathematics. After the early death of his father in 1933 the family fled from the Nazis to Palestine. There Straus was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Without an undergraduate degree, he began his studies in 1941 at Columbia University in New York, where he made ​​his master's degree in 1942 and then worked as a graduate student F. J. Murray. 1944 to 1948 he was assistant to Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study, with whom he worked on a unified field theory, which became the subject of his doctoral thesis. As a result, he was instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles, which he remained until his death from heart failure.

His topics and areas of interest were transformed in the course of his career. Starting with work to the theory of relativity, he began a depression in analytic number theory, graph theory and combinatorics. In popular mathematics, the Erdős - Straus conjecture about unit fractions of the form 4 / n is known. With Erdos, whom he knew in Princeton since his time, he published 21 works. He also published, among others, Richard Bellman, Béla Bollobás, Sarvadaman Chowla, Ronald Graham, László Lovász, Paul Kelly, Carl Pomerance, and George Szekeres Olga Taussky - Todd.

Ernst Gabor Straus was co-editor from 1951 to 1964 and from 1954 to 1959 editor of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics.

He was married in 1944 and had two sons.