Richard Alejandro Arratia is a mathematician noted for his work in combinatorics and probability theory.
Arratia developed the ideas of interlace polynomials with Béla Bollobás and Gregory Sorkin,[paper 1] found an equivalent formulation of the Stanley–Wilf conjecture as the convergence of a limit,[paper 2] and was the first to investigate the lengths of superpatterns of permutations.[paper 2]
He has also written highly cited papers on the Chen–Stein method on distances between probability distributions,[paper 3][paper 4] on random walks with exclusion,[paper 5] and on sequence alignment.[paper 6][paper 7]
He is a coauthor of the book Logarithmic Combinatorial Structures: A Probabilistic Approach.[book 1][1][2]
Arratia earned his Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the supervision of David Griffeath.[3] He is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California.[4]