Roy Adler

Roy Lee Adler (1931 to 2016) was an American mathematician who worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He earned his doctorate at Yale University in 1961 under Shizuo Kakutani, with a thesis on algebraic aspects of measure preserving transformations. His research covered dynamical systems, ergodic theory, symbolic and topological dynamics and coding theory. With Alan Konheim and M. H. McAndrew he wrote the 1965 paper on topological entropy, and with Benjamin Weiss he showed that entropy is a complete metric invariant for automorphisms of the torus. He also wrote a survey of symbolic dynamics and Markov partitions in 1998. The road coloring problem, solved by Avraham Trakhtman in 2007, came from Adler together with L. Wayne Goodwyn and Benjamin Weiss. He was a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.