Date of Birth: 
About Frank Garvan
- Francis G.
- Garvan (born March 9, 1955) is an Australian-born mathematician who specializes in number theory and combinatorics.
- He holds the position Professor of Mathematics at the University of Florida.
- He received his Ph.D.
- from Pennsylvania State University (January, 1986) with George E.
- Andrews as his thesis advisor.
- Garvan's thesis, Generalizations of Dyson's rank, concerned the rank of a partition and formed the groundwork for several of his later papers.Garvan is well-known for his work in the fields of q-series and integer partitions.
- Most famously, in 1988, Garvan and Andrews discovered a definition of the crank of a partition.
- The crank of a partition is an elusive combinatorial statistic similar to the rank of a partition which provides a key to the study of Ramanujan congruences in partition theory.
- It was first described by Freeman Dyson in a paper on ranks for the journal Eureka in 1944.
- Andrews and Garvan's definition was the first definition of a crank to satisfy the properties hypothesized for it in Dyson's paper.
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