Robert P. Dilworth

Robert Palmer Dilworth (2 December 1914 to 29 October 1993) was an American mathematician whose primary research area was lattice theory. The MacTutor biography states that he was one of the main factors in the subject moving from being merely a tool of other disciplines to an important subject in its own right. He is best known for Dilworth's theorem of 1950 relating chains and antichains in partial orders, and he was the first to study antimatroids in 1940. He was born in Hemet, California, then a remote desert ranching town, went to the California Institute of Technology, received his baccalaureate in 1936 and continued there for graduate study under Morgan Ward, and on receiving his doctorate in 1939 took an instructorship at Yale University.