Provan Home Page

	J. Scott Provan Professor Department of Operations Research University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Contact	Office: 204 Smith Building, UNC Campus Telephone: (919) 962-3836 FAX: (919) 962-0391 E-mail: Scott_Provan@UNC.edu Mailing Address: CB #3180, UNC, Chapel Hill NC 27599-3180
Research Areas	Network Design and Reliability; Linear & Combinatorial Optimization
Recent Publications	Network Reliability, with C.J. Colbourn and M.O. Ball, Chapter 11 in Handbooks in OR & MS 7, Elsevier Science, 1995 673-762 Minimal connected enclosures on an embedded planar graph, with C. Alexopolous, H.D. Ratliff, and B.R. Stutzman. Discrete Applied Mathematics 91 1999, 25--38. A fully polynomial approximation scheme for the Euclidean Steiner augmentation problem, in Advances in Steiner Trees D.-Z. Du, J.M. Smith, and J.H. Rubinstein (eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, 235--253. On the structure and complexity of the 2-connected Steiner network problem in the plane, with E.L. Luebke, Operations Research Letters26 2000, 111--116.
Fall Semester 2007 Courses	STOR072: Unlocking the Human Genome STOR724: Networks
Bio	Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University in 1977. Assistant Professor in the Applied Mathematics and Statistics Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1977 through 1982, spending 1980-82 as an NRC Postdoctoral Associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. At the University of North Carolina since 1982; visited at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada in 1988-89. Held the Paul Ziff Term Professorship at the University of North Carolina for the period 1994-97, and was chair of the department from 1995-2000. Areas of research include: network and combinatorial reliability, Steiner tree and other network design problems, polyhedral combinatorics, combinatorial listing and enumeration algorithms, and other network and combinatorial optimization problems. He is currently developing the IDEAS database -- an instructional database of algorithms in operations research and related mathematical areas specifically designed for learning the use of software. Vitae (in pdf)