Igor Pak

Who is Igor Pak?

Igor Pak is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in combinatorics and discrete probability. He formerly taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Minnesota and is best known for his bijective proof of the hook-length formula for the number of Young tableaux, and his work on random walks. Pak has co-authored a paper on Markov chains with László Lovász, which gives him an Erdős number of 2. He was a keynote speaker alongside George Andrews and Doron Zeilberger at the 2006 Harvey Mudd College Mathematics Conference on Enumerative Combinatorics.

Pak is an Associate Editor for the journal Discrete Mathematics. He gave a Fejes Tóth Lecture at the University of Calgary in February 2009.