Person: Rado, Richard

Richard Rado was a German-born British mathematician who worked on combinatorics and graph theory.

Richard, his parents' second son, made a decision while at school to choose between being a concert pianist or a mathematician.
Rado's thesis, entitled Studies on combinatorics, earned him a doctorate in 1933.
They had one son, Peter Rado, born in 1943.
Rado was interviewed in Berlin by Lord Cherwell for a scholarship given by the chemist Sir Robert Mond which provided financial support to study at Cambridge.
Rado entered Fitzwilliam House, University of Cambridge, and completed a second Ph.D. in 1935 under Hardy's supervision on Linear transformations of sequences.
While at Cambridge Rado was influenced by many mathematicians working there at the time including Hardy, Littlewood, Hall, Besicovitch and Bernhard Neumann.
Rado also worked with Heilbronn and Davenport and, at around this time, he began to correspond with Erdős.
In 1936 Rado was appointed to the University of Sheffield where, after Mirsky was appointed in 1942, the two became close friends.
In 1947 Rado moved to King's College, London, moving seven years later to a chair at the University of Reading.
Rado's work covered a wide range of mathematics but his most important work was in combinatorics.
These important combinatorial results were in the area of Hall's theorem, Ramsey's theorem, the Rado selection principle, matroids and theory of transversals, and partitions.
Rado received many honours for his contributions.
Rado was the kindest and gentlest of men.

Born 28 April 1906, Berlin, Germany. Died 23 December 1989, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Germany

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

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