Biography of George E. Andrews

In high school, mathematician George E. Andrews was told by a guidance counselor that it was impossible to find a truly interesting career, so he should find something dull but practical to study. It turned out to be great advice for Andrews to ignore. “I chose to do what I loved,” he says. And the mathematical puzzles he grew to love possessed surprising links to ideas throughout 20th-century science and mathematics. Andrews has followed his mathematical inspirations through a career that has taken him from the splendor of a footnoted formula to the unearthing of a mathematical treasure in a university library in Cambridge, England. Along the way, he has solved longstanding mathematical problems and made significant contributions to the fields of number theory, combinatorics, and theoretical physics.

An Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA), Andrews was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. He serves on the editorial board for numerous journals, including Discrete Mathematics, Ramanujan Journal, Contemporary Mathematics, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, and Annals of Combinatorics. Andrews was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Parma (Parma, Italy) in 1998, from the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL) in 2002, and from the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) in 2004. He has also lectured about mathematics in every continent, he says, “except Antarctica.”

Andrews has found an enduring source of research inspiration in a fundamental branch of number theory called partitions, which studies the ways that whole numbers can be split into sums of whole numbers. In his Inaugural Article, published in this issue of PNAS, Andrews explores types of partitions with special restrictions on the summands (1). While developing the topic for his Inaugural Article, Andrews realized that a key lay in a particular function of …