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 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.