Interview with Douglas West

Photo by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Douglas B. West completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton University in 1974. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1978 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Daniel J. Kleitman. During his career, he taught and conducted research at Stanford University (1978–79), Princeton University (1979–82), the University of California, Berkeley (1989–90), the University of Illinois (1982–present), and Zhejiang Normal University (2012–present). Since 2011 he has been a Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois. Professor West has been the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Discrete Mathematics since 2017 and has advised 38 Ph.D. theses. He has hosted an up-to-date listing of conferences in discrete mathematics on his homepage since 1997 and is known for his textbooks Introduction to Graph Theory (Prentice-Hall 1996, 2001) and Combinatorial Mathematics (Cambridge 2021).