Professor Fan Chung Graham was awarded an honorary doctorate in mathematics (D.Math.) at the October 20 convocation ceremony at the University of Waterloo.
Professor Chung Graham is Distinguished Professor Mathematics and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at San Diego. She earned her Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. She worked in Bell Laboratories and Bell Corporation from 1979-1993 and subsequently held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study and Pennsylvania State University, before moving to the University of California at San Diego in 1988.
Professor Chung Graham is one of the best known people working in combinatorics, with three books and over 270 papers to her credit. She has made many distinguished contributions to graph theory and combinatorics; in more recent years her work includes graph algorithms for complex networks and ranking algorithms based on random walks.
Her work on random graphs and the application of probabilistic techniques to combinatorial problem is particularly significant; she has both developed new tools and found new applications. She has also been vey successful in the application of so-called spectral techniques to a range of problems. Her work is widely read, and has had a major impact on the field.
Professor Chung Graham has numerous awards to her credit. In 1990 she won the Allendoerfer Award of the Mathematical Association of America. In 1994 she gave an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich. She is a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the American Mathematical Society, and of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and serves on the editorial boards of over 15 journals.