George B. Purdy

George Barry Purdy (20 February 1944 – 30 December 2017) was a mathematician and computer scientist who specialized in cryptography, combinatorial geometry, and number theory. Purdy received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1972, officially under the supervision of Paul T. Bateman, but his de facto adviser was Paul Erdős. He was on the faculty in the mathematics department at Texas A&M University for 11 years, and was appointed the Geier Professor of computer science at the University of Cincinnati in 1986.

Purdy had Erdős number one and coauthored many papers with Paul Erdős, who regarded him as his own student. He is the "P" in G.W. Peck, a pseudonym for the group of mathematicians that also included Ronald Graham, Douglas West, Paul Erdős, Fan Chung, and Daniel Kleitman.