Uppaluri S R Murty

U.S.R.Murty completed his Ph.D. degree from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta, in 1966, supervised by C.R.Rao. The thesis is titled “Extremal Graph Theoretic Problems with Applications”. Claude Berge and Paul Erd˝os visited ISI, and Murty acknowledges their influence in his thesis. Murty then spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. In the fall of 1967, he became a professor in the C&O Department at the University of Waterloo. He played a key role in the early growth of the department. He developed a bond with Bill and Dorothea Tutte, and frequently visited their home in West Montrose. Years later, Murty wrote an essay Remembering Bill Tutte about this friendship.

Murty had a deep and wide knowledge of mathematics, a remarkable memory, and he was fluent in several languages, including Hungarian and Portuguese. He loved to communicate mathematics and he was a valued teacher. Murty’s first book “Graph Theory with Applications” (1976) was written with his colleague Adrian Bondy, based on course notes from their classes. The book was probably the most popular introduction to the subject of that era; Murty enjoyed the resulting recognition. He supervised or co-supervised several Ph.D. students including William Richardson (1973), William Cook (1983), Kyriakos Kilakos (1993) & Nishad Kothari (2016). Murty retired from the University of Waterloo in 1996, and started on a new chapter.

Together with Bondy, he worked for around a decade on their second book “Graph Theory”; it was published in 2008.

During 1988-1989, Murty visited Brazil for the second or third time. On that occasion, he gave a series of lectures titled “The Matching Lattice”, describing most of Lov´asz’s work on the subject. That activity started a collaboration with Cl´audio Lucchesi. Later he co-supervised Marcelo Carvalho, Lucchesi’s Ph.D. student. In his thesis, Carvalho proved a conjecture of Lov´asz on the existence of b-invariant edges in bricks distinct from the Petersen graph. This research blossomed into a productive collaboration of Carvalho, Lucchesi and Murty, resulting in more than 15 papers. This collaboration was crowned with the writing of the book “Perfect Matchings”, which was published in 2024.

Murty was a master at word games, Scrabble in particular, aided by his outstanding memory, and he competed in many Scrabble contests. He initiated many lasting friendships, and he was fond of children. Murty travelled widely. In particular, he often visited his large family in south India. He had a large album of family photos, and there are photos of him, with beaming face, gently cradling a young child in his arms.

In early 2021, Murty was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Despite prolonged treatment, the cancer could not be stopped. He was courageous and stoic in his final years, while continuing to be generous to those around him, and he continued working on Matching Theory.