Richard K. Guy

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Richard K. Guy in June, 2005

Richard Kenneth Guy (born 1916, Nuneaton, Warwickshire) is a British mathematician, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calgary.

He is best known for co-authorship (with John Conway and Elwyn Berlekamp) of Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and authorship of Unsolved Problems in Number Theory (ISBN 0-387-94289-0), but he has also published over 100 papers and books covering combinatorial game theory, number theory and graph theory.

He is said to have developed the partially tongue-in-cheek "Law of Small Numbers," which says there are not enough small integers available for the many tasks assigned to them — thus explaining many coincidences and patterns found among numerous cultures.

Additionally, around 1959, Guy discovered a unistable polyhedron having only 19 faces; no such construct with fewer faces has yet been found.

Guy is also a notable figure in the field of chess endgame studies. He composed around 200 studies, and was co-inventor of the Guy-Blandford-Roycroft code for classifying studies. He also served as the endgame study editor for the British Chess Magazine from 1948 to 1951.

Guy is one of the few mathematicians with an Erdős number of 1.

[edit] Selected publications

Richard K. Guy: Aviezri Fraenkel and Combinatorial Games. Electr. J. Comb. 8(2): (2001)
Béla Bollobás, Richard K. Guy: Equitable and proportional coloring of trees. J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 34(2): 177-186 (1983)
Richard K. Guy, Gerhard Ringel: Triangular imbedding of Kn - K6. J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 21(2): 140-145 (1976)