Frank Harary

Frank Harary was an American mathematician who specialized in graph theory and is widely recognized as one of the fathers of modern graph theory. Born in New York City in 1921 to a family of Jewish immigrants from Syria and Russia, he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Brooklyn College and his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1948 under Alfred L. Foster. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1953, becoming professor of mathematics in 1964, and from 1987 was a professor in computer science at New Mexico State University. He was a founder of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory and the Journal of Graph Theory, and with his many doctoral students he standardized the terminology of graphs and broadened the field toward physics, psychology, sociology and anthropology. He published over 800 papers with some 300 co-authors and died in 2005.