American mathematician
David P. Sumner is an American mathematician known for his research in graph theory. He formulated Sumner's conjecture that tournaments are universal graphs for polytrees in 1971,[1] and showed in 1974 that all claw-free graphs with an even number of vertices have perfect matchings.[2] He and András Gyárfás independently formulated the Gyárfás–Sumner conjecture according to which, for every tree T, the T-free graphs are χ-bounded.
Sumner earned his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970, under the supervision of David J. Foulis.[3] He is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina.[4]
References
- ^ Kühn, Daniela; Mycroft, Richard; Osthus, Deryk (2011), "A proof of Sumner's universal tournament conjecture for large tournaments", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Third Series, 102 (4): 731–766, arXiv:1010.4430, doi:10.1112/plms/pdq035, MR 2793448, S2CID 119169562, Zbl 1218.05034.
- ^ Faudree, Ralph; Flandrin, Evelyne; Ryjáček, Zdeněk (1997), "Claw-free graphs — A survey", Discrete Mathematics, 164 (1–3): 87–147, doi:10.1016/S0012-365X(96)00045-3, MR 1432221.
- ^ David Sumner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ Faculty & Staff Directory: David Sumner, University of South Carolina Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2015-08-30.
External links