Michel Marie Deza (27 April 1939 – 23 November 2016) was a Soviet and French mathematician, specializing in combinatorics, discrete geometry and graph theory. He was the retired director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the vice president of the European Academy of Sciences, a research professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and one of the three founding editors-in-chief of the European Journal of Combinatorics.
Deza graduated from Moscow University in 1961, after which he worked at the Soviet Academy of Sciences until emigrating to France in 1972. In France, he worked at CNRS from 1973 until his 2005 retirement.
He has written eight books and about 280 academic papers with 75 different co-authors, including four papers with Paul Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 1.
The papers from a conference on combinatorics, geometry and computer science, held in Luminy, France in May 2007, have been collected as a special issue of the European Journal of Combinatorics in honor of Deza's 70th birthday.
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