Dominic Welsh

James Anthony Dominic Welsh (born 29 August 1938)^[1][2][3] is an English mathematician, an emeritus professor of Oxford University's Mathematical Institute. He is an expert in matroid theory,^[4] the computational complexity of combinatorial enumeration problems, percolation theory, and cryptography.

Biography

Welsh obtained his PhD from Oxford University under the supervision of John Hammersley.^[5] After working as a researcher at Bell Laboratories, he joined the Mathematical Institute in 1963, and became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1966. He was given a personal chair in 1992, and retired in 2005.^[2]

He chaired the British Combinatorial Committee from 1983 to 1987.^[2]

Books

• Matroid Theory (LMS Monographs, vol. 8, Academic Press, 1976, MR 0427112, reprinted by Dover Publications, 2010, ISBN 978-0486474397)
• Probability: An Introduction (with Geoffrey Grimmett, Oxford University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-19-853264-4, MR 0869591)
• Codes and Cryptography (Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 978-0198532873, MR 0959137)
• Complexity: Knots, Colourings and Counting (LMS Lecture Notes, vol. 186, Oxford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-521-45740-8, MR 1245272)
• Complexity and Cryptography: An Introduction (with John Talbot, Cambridge University Press, 2006, MR 2221458)^[6]

Awards and honours

Welsh received an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo in 2006.^[2]

In 2007, Oxford University press published Combinatorics, Complexity, and Chance: A Tribute to Dominic Welsh, an edited volume of research papers dedicated to Welsh.

The Russo-Seymour-Welsh estimate in percolation theory is partly named after Welsh.

References

1. Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900-1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 497.
2. Prof Dominic J A Welsh, Debrett's, retrieved 2012-03-11.
3. David R. Wood. "The Academic Family Tree of John M. Hammersley" (PDF).
4. Oxley, James (2007), "The contributions of Dominic Welsh to matroid theory", in Grimmett, Geoffrey; McDiarmid, Colin, Combinatorics, Complexity, and Chance: A Tribute to Dominic Welsh (PDF), doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198571278.003.0015.
5. Dominic J. A. Welsh at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
6. Review of Complexity and Cryptography by J. Rothe (2007), SIGACT News 38 (2): 16–20, doi:10.1145/1272729.1272735.