Michel Marie Desa (April 27, 1939, Moscow - November 23, 2016, Paris) is a Soviet and French mathematician, specializing in combinatorics, discrete geometry and graph theory. He was director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), vice-President of the European Academy of Sciences, Professor of the Japanese Institute of Science and Advanced Technology and one of the three founding editors of the European Combinatorics Journal.

Deza (nee Mikhail Efimovich Tyylkin) graduated from Moscow University in 1961, after that he worked in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR before emigrating to France in 1972. In France, he worked for the CNRS from 1973 to 2005 until retirement. He wrote eight books and about 280 scientific papers with 75 different co-authors, including four works with Paul Erdos, which gave him the number of Erdos 1.

Materials of the conference on combinatorics, geometry and computer science, held in Lumini, France, in May 2007, were collected in a special issue of the European Combinatorics Magazine in honor of the 70th anniversary of M. Deza.

The wife of Michel Marie Desa, Elena Ivanovna Desa, is also a mathematician, a professor at the MPGU.

Was killed in Paris on November 23, 2016 in a fire.

Photo gallery

Links

Wikipedia page

Math-Net.ru page

The article in Chebyshev sbornik

Books

Scale-Isometric Polytopal Graphs in Hypercubes and Cubic Lattices

Geometry Of Chemical Graphs. Polycycles and Two-faced Maps

Dictionary Of Distances

Encyclopedia of Distances

Articles

Solution d’Un Probleme de Erdos-Lovasz

Poetry collections

Michel Desa. Poems and interviews

Michel Desa. 75 – 77

Performances

Partial Metrics, Quasi-metrics and Oriented Hypercubes

Similarities and Distances in Biology

Some problems, I care most

Discrete Geometry, Combinatorics and Applications. Research Overview

Elementary polycycles

Extended Family of Fullerenes

Polycycles and face-regular two-maps

Fullerene Manifolds and Special Fullerenes

Goldberg-Coxeter construction for 3- or 4- valent plane graphs

Discrete Geometry, Combinatorics and Applications. Some recent research topics: I. Fullerenes: IQ and virus structure II. Space fullerenes and metallic alloys III. Railroads and zigzags in fullerenes IV. Ambiguous boundaries of polycycles

Extended Family of Fullerenes and Lego-like Maps

Space fullerenes

Fullerenes: applications and generalizations

Some Quasi-metrics and Oriented Hypercubes

Distances in Pattern Recognition

Some problems, I care most

Polycycles and their boundaries

Prefacae for European Journal of Combinatorics

Geometry of the Structure of Viruses

Voronoi L-types and Hypermetrics

Wythoff construction and l₁-embedding

Zigzags and central circuits for 3- or 4-valent plane graphs