As part of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program, Ronald L. Graham will speak in Amoco Hall at the Swearingen Engineering Center at 4:45 p.m. March 23. The event is free and open to the public.

Graham is considered a major figure in the areas of computing and concrete mathematics. His lecture, entitled "Searching for the Shortest Network," will address a classical problem that has challenged mathematicians for nearly two centuries and today has great relevance in such diverse areas as telecommunication networks, design of VLSI chips and molecular phylogenetics.

Graham spent 37 years at Bell Labs as a researcher, leaving in 1999 as chief scientist. During that time he also held visiting positions at Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, and UCLA, and Rutgers. He currently holds the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair of Computer and Information Science at California, San Diego. His research within the field of discrete mathematics includes Ramsey theory, the development of the theory of quasirandomness, as well as contributions to the number theory, approximation algorithms, and computational geometry. He has received numerous awards, including the Polya Prize in Combinatorics from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Steele Prize for lifetime achievement from the American Mathematical Society. Graham is past president of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Graham's visit is made possible by the national Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program, the USC chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the student chapter of SIAM, and the Departments of Mathematics and of Computer Science and Engineering. For more information, contact the College of Engineering and Information Technology at 7-7356 or Susanne Brenner, mathematics, at 7-5218.

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