Joel Spencer

Joel H. Spencer ( born April 20, 1946) is an American mathematician ( combinatorics ) and computer scientists.

Spencer won as a teenager in 1962 the Putnam Competition, studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Bachelor 1965) and was established in 1970 with Andrew Gleason at Harvard University PhD ( Probabilistic methods in combinatorial theory ). 1967/68 he was. At Bell Laboratories and thereafter until 1971 at the Rand Corporation From 1971 he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1972 at MIT and in 1975 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. From 1988 he was professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He has been a visiting scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study (1997, 1998), the Mittag-Leffler Institute, at Microsoft, at the University of Melbourne, in Budapest and at the Weizmann Institute.

Spencer is a student of Paul Erdős. He dealt with Ramsey theory, asymptotic combinatorics and probabilistic algorithms and methods. From 1977 to 1981 he was a Sloan Fellow. In 1994 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich ( Probabilistic methods in combinatorics ). In 1984 he was awarded the Lester Randolph Ford Award. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

From 1987 to 1989 he had a mathematical column ( Brain Bogglers ) in Discover magazine ( as Maxwell Carver ).

Writings

• With Paul Erdős: Probabilistic methods in combinatorial mathematics, Academic Press, Akademiai Kiado 1974
• With Paul Erdős, Noga Alon: The probabilistic method, Wiley 1992, 3rd edition 2008
• Ten lectures on the probabilistic method, SIAM, 1987, 2nd edition 1994
• Ronald Graham, BL Rothschild, Ramsey Theory, Wiley, 2nd edition 1990
• The strange logic of random graphs, Springer 2001