Mehdi Behzad

Mehdi Behzad (born 22 April 1936) is an Iranian mathematician who specializes in graph theory. During his doctoral studies in 1965 he introduced his total coloring theory, whose central problem is known as Behzad's conjecture or the total chromatic number conjecture and is still open. He co-wrote two early graph theory textbooks published in the United States in the 1970s and was a direct collaborator of Paul Erdős. He was the first faculty member of Sharif University of Technology to be promoted to full professor. He has also worked to build mathematics education and public interest in mathematics in Iran, as a founding member and president of the Iranian Mathematical Society and a founding member and first secretary general of the Iranian Academy of Sciences.