Person: Kelly, Paul Joseph

Paul Kelly was an American mathematician who worked in geometry and graph theory.

Kelly became Chairman of the Mathematics department at Santa Barbara in 1957.
Kelly retired in 1982.
Let us look briefly at some of the Kelly's mathematical papers, which were mainly on topics in geometry and graph theory, and at his books.
In this paper Kelly proved the conjecture for the case of certain isometries of a class of finite metric spaces.
Kelly showed that this theorem went over to entire subsets of Minkowski nnn-space.
Examples of papers by Kelly on graph theory are A congruence theorem for trees published in the Pacific Journal in 1957, On some mappings related to graphs published in the same journal in 1964, and The minimal regular graph containing a given graph co-authored with Paul Erdős and published in 1967.
We mention three texts written by Kelly, each with a different co-author.
Kelly's 1979 text Geometry and convexity was written jointly with Max L Weiss.
The third text we mention is The non-Euclidean, hyperbolic plane : Its structure and consistency which Kelly wrote jointly with Gordon Matthews and published in 1981.
Paul Kelly had a wonderful sense of language, the comic, the human tragi-comic condition, and the crucial role of timing in any enterprise.
Paul was also a sports enthusiast who wished he'd been big enough to play football.

Born 26 June 1915, Riverside, California, USA. Died 15 July 1995, Santa Barbara, California, USA.

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Origin Usa

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O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive