David P. Sumner is an American mathematician known for his research in graph theory. He formulated Sumner's conjecture that tournaments are universal graphs for polytrees in 1971, and showed in 1974 that all claw-free graphs with an even number of vertices have perfect matchings. He and András Gyárfás independently formulated the Gyárfás–Sumner conjecture according to which, for every tree T, the T-free graphs are χ-bounded.
Sumner earned his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970, under the supervision of David J. Foulis. He is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina.
References
- Kühn, Daniela; Mycroft, Richard; Osthus, Deryk (2011), "A proof of Sumner's universal tournament conjecture for large tournaments", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Third Series, 102 (4): 731–766, arXiv:1010.4430, doi:10.1112/plms/pdq035, MR 2793448, S2CID 119169562, Zbl 1218.05034.
- Faudree, Ralph; Flandrin, Evelyne; Ryjáček, Zdeněk (1997), "Claw-free graphs — A survey", Discrete Mathematics, 164 (1–3): 87–147, doi:10.1016/S0012-365X(96)00045-3, MR 1432221.
- David Sumner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Faculty & Staff Directory: David Sumner, University of South Carolina Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2015-08-30.
External links
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