Richard M. Pollack


Richard M. Pollack was an American geometer who spent most of his career at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, where he was Professor Emeritus till his death. In 1986 he and Jacob E. Goodman were the founding co-editors-in-chief of the journal Discrete & Computational Geometry.

Contributions

In combinatorics he is known principally for his work with Paul Erdős and János Pach. In discrete geometry he is known for a number of basic concepts and results, jointly with his long-term collaborator, Jacob E. Goodman; of the City College, City University of New York, and some with others. His work with Goodman includes such results as the first nontrivial bounds on the number of order types and polytopes, and a generalization
of the Hadwiger transversal theorem to higher dimensions.
In real algebraic geometry he is known principally for a series of papers authored jointly with Saugata Basu and Marie-Françoise Roy and for their book.

Awards and honors

In 2003, a collection of original research papers in discrete and computational geometry entitled Discrete and Computational Geometry: The Goodman–Pollack Festschrift was published as a tribute to Jacob E. Goodman and Richard Pollack on the occasion of their 2/3 × 100 birthdays.
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.