Background
Brian Alspach was born on May 29, 1938 in North Dakota.
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Brian Alspach
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Alspach has also studied the mathematics behind poker, and writes for Poker Digest and Canadian Poker Player magazines. He attended the University of Washington from 1957 to 1961, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1961. In 1964 he received his masters degree and in 1966 he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara under the supervision of Paul Kelly.
Career
He taught at a junior high school for one year before beginning his graduate studies. He taught at Simon Fraser University for 33 years. He retired from there in 1998.
He currently works as an adjunct professor at the University of Regina and has been there since 1999.
He is responsible for creating an industrial mathematics degree at Simon Fraser University. Brian Alspach believes that the growth and future of mathematics will depend on the business people in the industrial businesses.
His interests are in graph theory and its applications. One of his theories of coverings and decomposition has been applied to scheduling issues that can arise in the business world.
Alspach states that his biggest issue with this is trying to explain such complex math to people in the business world with only a basic understanding of mathematics
He has mentored a total of 13 Doctor of Philosophy students. One of his first publications was an article titled Cycles of each length in regular tournaments, which was published in the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin (November, 1967). Another influential piece of Brian Alspach is Point-symmetric graphs and digraphs of prime order and transitive permutation groups of prime degree, which was published in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory (August, 1973).
In his article titled Isomorphism of circulant graphs and digraphs which was published in Discrete Mathematics (February, 1979).
He discusses the isomorphism problem for a special class of graphs. Brian Alspach coauthored an article with T.D.Parsons titled A construction for vertex –transitive graph published in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics (April, 1982).
He coauthored an article with Heather Gavlas titled Cycle decomposition of &, in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B (January, 2001).
