... graduated from Mamaroneck High School and from Allegheny College Meadville Pennsylvania. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa Delta Sigma Rho and Alpha Xi Delta.Alan and Shirley Stanley had three children, Richard Stanley born 23 June 1944, the subject of this biography being the first. When Richard was born, his father was serving overseas and his mother was living with her parents in Larchmont, New York. Richard had two younger siblings, Juliet Susan Stanley (born 9 July 1946, died 13 August 1973) and Lawrence A Stanley (born 1 December 1947).
... we moved to New York City, where my father worked for my mother's father trying to set up a wire business. Around a year later my father got a job with National Lead Company in Tahawus.At Tahawus the National Lead Company was mining titanium dioxide and Alan Stanley began working there in 1946. Tahawus is in Newcomb, Essex County, New York and in 1950, when Richard Stanley was five years old, the family were living at 9 Stanford Drive, Newcomb, Essex, New York. In 1953 the Stanley family left Tahawus when Richard's father was transferred to a plant in Arlington, Massachusetts but were only about a year there before moving to Lynchburg, Virginia. Richard wrote [47]:-
I became interested in astronomy and for several years wanted to be an astronomer. From the ages of nine to thirteen I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia. One of my friends knew a woman named Mrs Cochran (whom I thought of as an elderly person). Mrs Cochran saw that I liked mathematics (though at that time I had no special interest in the subject), so she taught me the standard synthetic algorithm for finding the square root of a positive real number. This rule seemed like complete magic to me. I understood why the analogous synthetic algorithm for division ("long division") worked, but I had not the slightest understanding of the square root algorithm. ... I asked Mrs Cochran about this, but she only replied that I would understand it when I was older. ... I did spend lots of time computing square roots and trying to impress my parents that I could determine whether a positive integer was a perfect square.In 1958 the family moved again when Richard's father was transferred to a plant in Savannah, Georgia. Richard attended Wilder Junior High School where he sat next to Irvin Asher in the mathematics classes. (Asher later went on to obtain a B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T., moved to Israel, and died in 2010.) Asher told Richard Stanley that the complicated calculation which he was doing was working out how to calculate nth roots of a number and he'd already worked it out for n=4,5,6,7,8. Stanley, who had always been the best student in his mathematics class, suddenly thought he had met a mathematical genius in Asher. He wrote [47]:-
I became determined to learn as much mathematics as I possibly could. It was on this fateful day that I was bitten by the mathematical bug and became incurably infected.Stanley purchased G E Moore's Outline of College Algebra in the Barnes and Noble College Outline Series which he read carefully. He then began to study all the mathematics texts he could find in the Savannah Public Library and the Savannah High School library. In particular he found Martin Gardner's articles in Scientific American and was enthralled by hexaflexagons, Möbius strips and the mathematical problems he posed. Also at this time he joined the Mathematical Association of America and began reading the American Mathematical Monthly but found almost all the articles incomprehensible.
Rota was very enthusiastic, suggesting all kinds of combinatorics that I should learn and convinced me that I should work with him in combinatorics. But I actually ended up doing most of the work on my own, just talking to him about other topics, not directly related to my research.At Harvard, Stanley had taken a first level graduate complex variable course taught by David Mumford. He also took a course on algebraic topology taught by Albrecht Dold (1928-2011), who was visiting from Heidelberg University for the academic year. By the time he took this course he had become interested in combinatorics, so as the algebraic topology course was examined by a paper of his choice, he wrote on the homology of finite topological spaces. He attended Oscar Zariski's course on algebraic curves which proved a lucky choice [58]:-
When a graduate student felt ready to write a Minor Thesis, he or she was given a topic based on the courses taken so far. The topic was supposed to be unrelated to the courses, so the student had to learn something entirely new. The Minor Thesis had to be handed in three weeks after it was assigned. Since I had only audited Zariski's course (rather than taking it for credit), it did not appear on my record. Therefore I was given the topic "the Riemann-Roch theorem for curves." This turned out to be a central result in Zariski's course, so I didn't have to do much more than transcribe my notes.Stanley was appointed as a Teaching Assistant at Harvard University during 1968-1970, and then as C L E Moore Instructor of Mathematics at M.I.T. He began publishing papers, the first being Zero Square Rings, the paper he had submitted for the Eric Temple Bell Prize at Caltech. The next was Structure of incidence algebras and their automorphism groups which research announcement submitted to the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. It was communicated by Gian-Carlo Rota on 9 June 1970 and gave Stanley's address as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The chromatic polynomial of a graph G can be interpreted as the number of (appropriately defined) mappings of G into a complete n-graph. This paper discusses analogous polynomials concerned with mappings of a partially ordered set P into a totally ordered set of n elements.In fact Stanley had published nine papers before submitting his Ph.D. thesis Ordered structures and partitions to Harvard University in 1971. His official Harvard University advisor had remained John Tate(who remained his advisor on condition he did not have to read Stanley's thesis) but his actual advisor had been Gian-Carlo Rota. The thesis was published as a book in 1972 and you can read more about it at THIS LINK.
I spent a lot of time in the Common Room involved in such activities as blitz chess, bridge, table shuffleboard, and foosball. My time at Harvard took place during the Vietnam War. Many of the graduate students in the Mathematics Department were extremely politically active. I got converted from a conservative into a liberal who opposed the war. I was involved in some political activity such as the famous march on Washington in November, 1969, and on another occasion I spent a couple of hours in jail (with a lot of other people) for disturbing a public assembly, before bail was raised. Eventually I was fined $10.In fact Stanley completed all the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in 1970 but chose not to apply for graduation until 1971, thinking that it would stop him being drafted because of the Vietnam War. In fact deferment of the draft for more than four years was usually not allowed and indeed his request for an extension was turned down. He became eligible for the draft, was called for a medical which he passed, but was not drafted.
Some books seem like they shouldn't need reviews: The Bible, Moby Dick, Great Expectations, Euclid's Elements. Their names are so ingrained in our minds as the pinnacle of what a great book should be that it almost doesn't occur to us that a review is a good idea. Who is going to decide whether to read Shakespeare based on what folks on Amazon think of it? Now, Richard Stanley's Enumerative Combinatorics, Volume I is probably not quite at the level of the above-named classics, but it is about as close as a graduate-level text in mathematics can be. Don't believe me? Look at what others said about the first edition:For more information about all these books, see THIS LINK.
In a little over 300 pages of careful exposition, the author has packed a tremendous amount of information into this book." - MathSciNet
"This is a masterful work of scholarship which is, at the same time, eminently readable and teachable. It will be the standard work in the field for years to come." - Citation for 2001 Leroy Steele Prize For Mathematical Exposition, which Stanley won for the two volumes of his book.
"Historically then this is a book of major importance. It provides a widely accessible introduction to many topics in combinatorics ... Furthermore, it is sure to become a standard as an introductory graduate text in combinatorics." - George Andrews, writing in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.
"Best of all, Stanley has succeeded in dramatising the subject, in a book that will engage from start to finish the attention of any mathematician who will open it at page one." - Gian-Carlo Rota, in the preface to the first edition.
We survey the theory of increasing and decreasing subsequences of permutations. Enumeration problems in this area are closely related to the RSK algorithm. The asymptotic behaviour of the expected value of the length is(w) of the longest increasing subsequence of a permutation w of 1, 2, ... , n was obtained by Vershik-Kerov and (almost) by Logan-Shepp. The entire limiting distribution of is(w) was then determined by Baik, Deift, and Johansson. These techniques can be applied to other classes of permutations, such as involutions, and are related to the distribution of eigenvalues of elements of the classical groups. A number of generalisations and variations of increasing/decreasing subsequences are discussed, including the theory of pattern avoidance, unimodal and alternating subsequences, and crossings and nestings of matchings and set partitions.Asked in the interview [58] which of his results he considered most influential, he replied:-
My most influential results are all influential for basically the same reasons: the concepts and techniques turn out to be useful in other contexts, and they suggest extensions and generalisations for which much further progress can be made. These results are: (1) the theory of P-partitions, (2) combinatorial reciprocity, (3) applications of commutative algebra (especially face rings) and algebraic geometry (mainly, the hard Lefschetz theorem) to combinatorics, (4) stable Schubert polynomials (also called "Stanley symmetric functions") and their connection with reduced decompositions of permutations, and (5) chromatic symmetric functions. There is some other work that has had some influence, such as supersolvable lattices, order and chain polytopes, D-finite power series, a combinatorial interpretation of Schubert polynomials (with Sara Billey and William Jockusch), and a conjectured formula (proved by Valentin Feray) for the normalized character values of the symmetric group.In 2014 Stanley was appointed Arts and Sciences Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami. He retired from M.I.T. in 2018 and was appointed Emeritus Professor of Applied Mathematics.
I like juggling, although I'm not very active now. Bridge is something I enjoy. I like chess problems. I don't really like chess, but I like chess problems. It's a serious area that is very small and extremely well‐developed into an art form.
Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update March 2024