Education
Roberts did his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College, and received his Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University in 1968. His doctoral advisor was Dana Scott.
Roberts did his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College, and received his Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University in 1968. His doctoral advisor was Dana Scott.
After holding positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Research and Development, and the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the Rutgers faculty in 1972. He has been vice president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics twice, in 1984 and 1986, and has been director of DIMACS since 1996. Roberts" research concerns graph theory and combinatorics, and their applications in modeling problems in the social sciences and biology.
Among his contributions to pure mathematics, he is known for introducing the concept of boxicity, the minimum dimension needed to represent a given undirected graph as an intersection graph of axis-parallel boxes.
Roberts received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGACT Distinguished Service Prize in 1999. In 2001, he won the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Centers Pioneer Award for "pioneering the science and technology center concept". In 2003, DIMACS held a Conference on Applications of Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, in honor of Roberts" 60th birthday. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
American Mathematical Society.
