Arie Bialostocki

Arie Bialostocki (Hebrew: אריה ביאלוסטוקי) is an Israeli American mathematician with expertise and contributions in discrete mathematics and finite groups.

Education and career

Arie received his BSc, MSc, and PhD (1984) degrees from Tel-Aviv University in Israel. His dissertation was done under the supervision of Marcel Herzog. After a year of postdoc at University of Calgary, Canada, he took a faculty position at the University of Idaho, became a professor in 1992, and continued to work there until he retired at the end of 2011. At Idaho, Arie maintained correspondence and collaborations with researchers from around the world who would share similar interests in mathematics. His Erdős number is 1. He has supervised seven PhD students and numerous undergraduate students who enjoyed his colorful anecdotes and advice. He organized the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the University of Idaho from 1999 to 2003 attracting many promising undergraduates who themselves have gone on to their outstanding research careers.

Mathematics research

Arie has published more than 50 publications. Some of Bialostocki's contributions include:

• Bialostocki redefined a $B$-injector in a finite group G to be any maximal nilpotent subgroup $B$ of $G$ satisfying $d_2(B)=d_2(G)$, where $d_2(X)$ is the largest cardinality of a subgroup of $G$ which is nilpotent of class at most $2$. Using his definition, it was proved by several authors that in many non-solvable groups the nilpotent injectors form a unique conjugacy class.

• Bialostocki contributed to the generalization of the Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv theorem (also known as the EGZ theorem). He conjectured: if $A=(a_1,a_2,\dots ,a_n)$ is a sequence of elements of ${\mathbb{Z}}_m$, then $A$ contains at least $(\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor }{m})+(\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{\lceil n/2\rceil }{m})$ zero sums of length $m$. The EGZ theorem is a special case where $n=2m-1$. The conjecture was partially confirmed by Kisin, Füredi and Kleitman, and Grynkiewicz.

• Bialostocki introduced the EGZ polynomials and contributed to generalize the EGZ theorem for higher degree polynomials. The EGZ theorem is associated with the first degree elementary polynomial.

• Bialostocki and Dierker introduced the relationship of EGZ theorem to Ramsey Theory on graphs.

• Bialostocki, Erdős, and Lefmann introduced the relationship of EGZ theorem to Ramsey Theory on the positive integers.

• In Jakobs and Jungnickel's book "Einführung in die Kombinatorik", Bialostocki and Dierker are attributed for introducing Zero-sum Ramsey theory. In Landman and Robertson's book "Ramsey Theory on the Integers", the number $b(m,k;r)$ is defined in honor of Bialostocki's contributions to the Zero-sum Ramsey theory.

• Bialostocki, Dierker, and Voxman suggested a conjecture offering a modular strengthening of the Erdős–Szekeres theorem proving that the number of points in the interior of the polygon is divisible by $k$, provided that total number of points $n⩾k+2$. Károlyi, Pach and Tóth made further progress toward the proof of the conjecture.
• In Recreational Mathematics, Arie's paper on application of elementary group theory to Peg Solitaire is a suggested reading in Joseph Gallian's book on Abstract Algebra.