W. R. (Red) Alford

William Robert "Red" Alford, Ph.D, J.D. (July 21, 1937 – May 29, 2003) was an American mathematician and lawyer, who was best known for his work in the fields of topology and number theory.

W.R. Alford
Alford at the SERMON '99 conference
BornJuly 21, 1937 (1937-07-21)
Canton, Mississippi
DiedMay 29, 2003 (2003-05-30) (aged 65)
OccupationMathematician

Personal Life

Alford was born in Canton, Mississippi, to parents Clayton and Pennington Alford. After graduating high school, Alford became a member of the United States Air Force, and earned his Bachelor of Science in mathematics and physics from The Citadel (1959). Subsequently, he earned his Ph.D in mathematics from Tulane University (1963),[1] and his J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law (1976). After earning his J.D., he practiced law in Athens, Georgia, before returning to the mathematics faculty at the University of Georgia. He retired in 2002, and passed the next year after suffering from a brain tumor.[2]

Mathematics

Alford's dissertation at Tulane was entitled: Some Wild Embeddings of the One and Two Dimensional Spheres in the Three Sphere[3]

In 1994, in a paper with Andrew Granville and Carl Pomerance, he proved the infinitude of Carmichael numbers [4] based on a conjecture given by Paul Erdős.

MathSciNet credits Alford with eleven publications, of which two were in the prestigious Annals of Mathematics-the Carmichael numbers paper, and a 1970 paper in knot theory.

  1. W. R. (Red) Alford at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. "William R. (Red) Alford". Number Theory Web. Retrieved 2008-02-13.
  3. "Some wild embeddings of the one and two dimensional spheres in the three sphere". digitallibrary.tulane.edu. 19 October 2023. Retrieved 19 October 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  4. W. R. Alford, A. Granville, and C. Pomerance. "There are Infinitely Many Carmichael Numbers." (PostScript) Annals of Mathematics 139 (1994) 703-722.


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