Richard Rado
Born: 28 April 1906 in Berlin,
Germany
Died: 23 Dec 1989 in Reading, Berkshire,
England
Richard Rado made a decision while at school to choose between being a concert pianist or a mathematician. He chose mathematics and entered the University of Berlin to study mathematics. He also spent some time at Göttingen but returned to the University of Berlin to study for his doctorate under Schur. At this stage he was also strongly influenced by Schmidt. Rado's thesis, entitled Studies on combinatorics, earned him a doctorate in 1933.
Rado's family were Jewish so, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the family left for England. Rado entered Fitzwilliam House, University of Cambridge and completed a second PhD under Hardy's supervision on Linear transformations of sequences. While at Cambridge Rado was influenced by many mathematicians working there at the time including Hardy, Littlewood, Hall, Besicovitch and B H Neumann.
Rado also worked with Heilbronn and Davenport and, at around this time, Rado also began to correspond with Erdös. They met in 1934 and began a fruitful collaboration which resulted in a number of joint papers. This collaboration was described by Erdös in [1].
In 1936 Rado was appointed to Sheffield where, after Mirsky was appointed in 1942, the two became close friends. In 1947 Rado moved to King's College London, moving seven years later to a chair at the University of Reading. He remained at Reading until he retired in 1971.
Rado's work covered a wide range of mathematics but his most important work was in combinatorics. Some of his more minor work was in topics such as the convergence of sequences and series. He studied inequalities and geometry and measure theory, particularly working in this area with Besicovitch.
In graph theory he worked on infinite graphs and hypergraphs. His important combinatorial results were in the area of Hall's theorem, Ramsey's theorem and partitions.
Rado's approach to mathematics is described by Erdös in [1] where he comments:-
I was good at discovering perhaps difficult and interesting special cases and Richard was good at generalising them and putting them in their proper perspective.
In [5] Rado is described by saying:-
Richard was fascinated by mathematical beauty and sought after it. He always tried to formulate his results at their natural level of generality, so that their full power was exhibited, without their content being obscured by over-elaboration.