Frank Harary

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Frank Harary (March 11,1921 – January 4,2005) was a prolific American mathematician, who specialized in graph theory, widely recognized as "father" of modern graph theory.

Biography

Frank Harary was born in New York City, the oldest child to a family of Jewish immigrants from Syria and Palestine. He earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Brooklyn College in 1941 and 1945 respectively and his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in 1948. During 1948-1986 he was with the University of Michigan. Since 1987 he was Professor (and Distinguished Professor Emeritus) in the Computer Science Department at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. He was the founder of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory and Journal of Graph Theory. He passed away at Memorial Hospital.

Harary's work in graph theory was diverse. Some topics of great interest to him were:

Graph enumeration, that is, counting graphs of a specified kind. He coauthored a book on the subject (Harary and Palmer 1973). The main difficulty is that two graphs that are isomorphic are not counted twice; thus, one has to apply Polya's theory of counting under group action. Harary was an expert in this.
Signed graphs. Harary invented this branch of graph theory , which grew out of a problem of theoretical social psychology investigated by the psychologist Dorwin Cartwright and Harary
Applications of graph theory in numerous areas.

Among over 700 scholarly articles Harary authored, two were co-authored with Paul Erdős , giving Harary an Erdős number of 1.

Harary, Frank, Graph Theory (1969), Addison–Wesley, Reading, MA.
Harary, Frank, and Palmer, Edgar M., Graphical Enumeration (1973), Academic Press, New York, NY.