R. Leonard Brooks

Rowland Leonard Brooks (6 February 1916 to 18 June 1993) was an English mathematician, known for proving Brooks's theorem on the relation between the chromatic number and the degree of graphs. He was born in Lincolnshire and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he worked with fellow Trinity students W. T. Tutte, Cedric Smith and Arthur Harold Stone on the problem of squaring the square, the partitioning of rectangles and squares into unequal squares. They published both under their own names and under the pseudonym Blanche Descartes. After leaving Cambridge he worked as a full-time tax inspector.