Richard Rado

Richard Rado (1906-1989) was a German-born British mathematician whose research concerned combinatorics and graph theory. Jewish by background, he left Germany to escape Nazi persecution. He earned two doctorates, the first in 1933 from the University of Berlin and the second in 1935 from the University of Cambridge, where he had gone with the support of a scholarship from the chemist Sir Robert Mond. He became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Reading in 1954 and stayed there until he retired in 1971. His results include the Erdos-Rado theorem, which extends Ramsey's theorem to infinite sets, Rado's theorem on systems of linear equations from his thesis, the Milner-Rado paradox in set theory, and the Erdos-Ko-Rado theorem on intersecting families of finite sets, published with Paul Erdos and Chao Ko in 1961. The Rado graph is named after him, and he wrote 18 papers with Erdos. In 1972 he was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize.