Why the Key to a Mathematical Life is Collaboration
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Summary
Mathematician Fan Chung believes the diversity of a problem’s origins fuels new ways of thinking about it and increases the odds it can be solved.
“It’s quite fun to work with people from other disciplines,” says Chung, a professor at the University of California, San Diego who has authored more than 300 papers with collaborators in subjects ranging from chemistry to engineering.
One of her longest partnerships was with mathematician Ron Graham, with whom she published more than 100 papers, and who coined the term Erdős number—a measure of a mathematician’s collaborative distance from Paul Erdős.
“We always had a new problem,” she says. “It just kept on going.”
The pair also collaborated in marriage, tying the knot in 1983.
