News

Alumnus William T. Trotter Gives Colloquium Talk

Dr. William T. Trotter visited Tuscaloosa on Tuesday, September 11, 2018 to present a colloquium talk entiled “Dimension Theory for Posets – Graph Theory for Grown Ups”.

Dr. Trotter is a well-known mathematician, and is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Trotter obtained his PhD from the University of Alabama in 1969, and went on to build an impressive academic and administrative record: Dr. Trotter was at the University of South Carolina (USC) from 1973-1987, where he started as an Assistant Professor and was appointed as a Carolina Research Professor in 1986, and was the chair of the mathematics department at USC from 1979-1985. In 1987, Tom was recruited to the Arizona State University, where he served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics (1987-91 and 1995-97), Vice Provost for Academic Affairs (2000-02), and was named Regents’ Professor in 1992.  He was the director of the Combinatorics and Optimization Group at Bellcore Communication Research in Morristown New Jersey from 1991-1994.  Dr. Trotter moved to Georgia Tech, his current school, in 2002 as the chair of the mathematics department and was in this role until 2009. Dr. Trotter has also had many short/long term research visits in his career to various institutions in the US and Europe—including MIT, University of Paris, and Frei University of Berlin.

Dr. Trotter’s research is in Discrete Mathematics, Combinatorics and Graph Theory. He has maintained a very active research profile with more than 120 refereed journal publications and a very successful research monograph on partially ordered sets which is still a top seller after nearly two decades in print and significant theorems such as the Szemeredi-Trotter Theorem. Dr. Trotter has Erdos number 1. He is on the editorial board of many journals, including J. of Discrete Mathematics, J. Combinatorics, J. Graph Theory and Editor in Chief of Order. Dr. Trotter has had 18 graduate students graduate so far (14 PhD and 4 MsC). Dr. Trotter has been an organizer and co-organizer of many significant international organizations associated with SIAM, NSF, IMA, and his research has been supported by NSF and Department of Defense grants. Dr. Trotter has delivered hundreds of seminars, lectures, and lecture series all over the world, including Plenary Annual AMS and MAA Lectures.

faculty around a dinner table
Left to right: Martyn Dixon, Tom Trotter, David Halpern, Lawrence Roberts, Layachi Hadji, Evan Lee, Bob Moore, Bulent Tosun and Chuntian Wang.