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John Howard Smith is an American mathematician and retired professor of mathematics at Boston College. [1] He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963, under the supervision of Kenkichi Iwasawa. [1] [2] In voting theory, he is known for the Smith set, the smallest nonempty set of candidates such that, in every pairwise matchup (two-candidate election/runoff) between a member and a non-member, the member is the winner by majority rule, and for the Smith criterion, a property of certain election systems in which the winner is guaranteed to belong to the Smith set. [3] He has also made contributions to spectral graph theory [4] and additive number theory. [5]

References

  1. ^ a b Math faculty listing, Boston College, retrieved 2011-03-28.
  2. ^ John Howard Smith at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  3. ^ Smith, J.H. (1973), "Aggregation of Preferences with Variable Electorates", Econometrica, 41 (6): 1027–1041, doi: 10.2307/1914033, JSTOR  1914033.
  4. ^ Smith, John H. (1970), "Some properties of the spectrum of a graph", Combinatorial Structures and their Applications (Proc. Calgary Internat. Conf., Calgary, Alta., 1969), New York: Gordon and Breach, pp. 403–406, MR  0266799.
  5. ^ Fein, Burton; Gordon, Basil; Smith, John H. (1971), "On the representation of −1 as a sum of two squares in an algebraic number field", Journal of Number Theory, 3 (3): 310–315, doi: 10.1016/0022-314X(71)90005-9, MR  0319940.