# William Lawrence Kocay

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Canadian academic

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W. L. Kocay Alma mater University of Waterloo Scientific career Fields Graph theory Computer science Institutions University of Manitoba Doctoral advisor Ronald C. Read

**William Lawrence Kocay** is a Canadian professor at the department of computer science at [St. Paul's College](/source/St._Paul's_College_(Manitoba)) of the [University of Manitoba](/source/University_of_Manitoba) and a [graph theorist](/source/Graph_theory). He is known for his work in [graph algorithms](/source/Graph_algorithms) and the [reconstruction conjecture](/source/Reconstruction_conjecture) and is affectionately referred to as "Wild Bill" by his students. Bill Kocay is a former managing editor (from Jan 1988 to May 1997) of *Ars Combinatoria*, a Canadian journal of combinatorial mathematics, is a founding fellow of the [Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications](/source/Institute_of_Combinatorics_and_its_Applications).

His research interests include [algorithms](/source/Algorithm) for graphs, the development of mathematical software, the graph reconstruction problem, the graph isomorphism problem, [projective geometry](/source/Projective_geometry), [Hamiltonian cycles](/source/Hamiltonian_cycle), [planarity](/source/Planar_graph), [graph embedding algorithms](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Graph_embedding_algorithm&action=edit&redlink=1), graphs on surfaces, and [combinatorial designs](/source/Combinatorial_design).

## Publications

- Some new methods in reconstruction theory, W. L. Kocay – Combinatorial mathematics, IX (Brisbane, 1981), LNM

- Some NP-complete problems for hypergraph degree sequences, [CJ Colbourn](/source/Charles_Colbourn), WL Kocay, DR Stinson – Discrete Applied Mathematics, 1986 – portal.acm.org

## Books and software package

- [Graphs, algorithms, and optimization By William Kocay, Donald L. Kreher, Published 2004, CRC Press, 483 pages](https://books.google.com/books?id=zxSmHAoMiRUC)

- [Groups and graphs – A mainly Mac OS X software package for graphs, digraphs, combinatorial designs, projective configurations, polyhedra, graph embeddings in the torus and projective plane, and automorphism groups. It also constructs fractals.](http://bkocay.cs.umanitoba.ca/g&g/index.html) [Archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20180406154246/http://bkocay.cs.umanitoba.ca/G%26G/index.html) 2018-04-06 at the [Wayback Machine](/source/Wayback_Machine)

## See also

- [List of University of Waterloo people](/source/List_of_University_of_Waterloo_people)

## References

- [William Lawrence Kocay's homepage](http://bkocay.cs.umanitoba.ca/BillKocay.html) [Archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20090203033228/http://bkocay.cs.umanitoba.ca/BillKocay.html) 2009-02-03 at the [Wayback Machine](/source/Wayback_Machine)

- [William Lawrence Kocay](https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=44186) at the [Mathematics Genealogy Project](/source/Mathematics_Genealogy_Project)

Authority control databases: Academics Mathematics Genealogy Project zbMATH DBLP MathSciNet

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