Fred S. Roberts received his A.B. in mathematics from Dartmouth College in
1964 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University in
1967 and 1968. After his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of
Pennsylvania, he joined the professional staff of the RAND Corporation in
1968. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton in 1971-72, and then joined the faculty at Rutgers University,
where he is currently a Professor of Mathematics and a Fellow of RUTCOR,
the Rutgers Center for Operations Research. At Rutgers, he is a member of
four graduate faculties, in Mathematics, Operations Research,
Computational Molecular Biology, and Education. He has held visiting
positions at Cornell University, AT&T Bell Laboratoris, and Northeastern
University. At Rutgers, he has chaired the Applied Mathematics Committee
and has been Director of the Rutgers Center for Operations Research. In
January 1996, he was named the Director of DIMACS, the Center for Discrete
Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. DIMACS, with administrative
offices at Rutgers, is a National Science Foundation Science and
Technology Center and is a joint project of AT&T Labs- Research, Bell
Labs/Lucent Technologies, Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore), NEC
Research, Princeton University, and Rutgers. Dr. Roberts had previously
been the Associate Director of the center and was Acting Director on two
occasions.
Professor Roberts/ major research interests are in mathematical models in
the social, behavioral, biological, and environmental sciences and of
problems of communications and transportation; graph theory and
combinatories and their applications; measurement theory; utility,
decisonmaking, and social choice; and operations research. His first
book, "Discrete Mathematical Models, with Applications to Social,
Biological, and Environmental Problems", has been called a classic in the
field, and was translated into Russian in 1986. He has also authored
three other books: "Graph Theory and its Applications to Problems of
Society", "Measurement Theory, with Applications to Decisionmaking,
Utility, and the Social Sciences"; and "Applied Combinatories". Professor
Roberts is also the editor of fourteen other books covering such varied
topics as energy modeling, reliability of computer and communication
networks, mathematical psychology, computational biology, and precollege
discrete mathematics, and the author of some 145 scientific articles.
Professor Roberts has been a leader in focusing the mathematical sciences
community on outreach to areas outside of mathematics. He is currently on
the editorial board of six scientific journals in discrete mathematics,
mathematical and computer modeling, mathematical social sciences,
computational biology, and mathematical psychology. He has been an
organizer of 44 scientific conferences, including the 6-year DIMACS
"Special Year" on Mathematical Support for Molecular Biology, during which
he was instrumental in fostering lasting collaboration between
mathematical and biological scientists. He has been an active member of a
variety of professional organizations, and has held such positions as
Secretary, Vice President, President-Nominee of SIAM (The Society for
Industrial and Applied Mathematics), Secretary and Member of the Board of
the Societal Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, member of the COMAP
Consortium Council, member of the Committee on Applications of Mathematics
of the National Research Council, and member of the Board of Visitors of
the Office of Naval Research.
Professsor Roberts is a frequent lecturer all over the world. Among his
more noteworthy talks have been a 14-lecture series to Le Troisieme Cycle
Romand in Operations Research in Grimentz, Switzerland, an address to the
Beijing Mathematical Society, a talk at the International Congress on
Mathematics Educations, and an address to the Royal Nepal Academy of
Science.
Among his honors and awards, Professor Roberts has been the CBMS-NSF
Research Conference Lecturer at Colby College, the Outstanding
Mathematician Lecturer at the University of New Haven, and holder of the
Robert G. Stone Chair at Northeastern University. He was the recipient of
a Humbolt Fellowship (which he declined) and of a University Research
Initiative Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and he
recently received the Distinguished Service Award of ACM-SIGACT
(Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms
and Computation Theory).
Personal Homepage:
www.dimacs.rutgers.edu/froberts
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