Avraham Trahtman was not looking for fame when he solved the “road colouring problem”, a conundrum that has befuddled mathematicians for nearly four decades. Thanks to his age - 63 - as well as his past employment as a security guard and labourer, however, he has captured the imagination of many in his field and is something of a mathematical luminary.

In layman's terms, the road colouring problem, first posed in 1970 by the Israeli-American mathematicians Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler, assumes that it is possible to create a universal map to provide directions to a fixed point that works no matter where you start from. Experts say that the solution could have real applications in mapping. “Let's say you are lost in a town you have never been in before and you have to get to a friend's house and there are no street signs - the directions will work no matter what,” Stuart Margolis, a colleague of Dr Trahtman at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, said.

“In math circles, we talk about beautiful results - this is beautiful and it is unexpected. Even in layman's terms it is completely counterintuitive, but somehow it works.”

Dr Trahtman says of his solution: “People were looking at things from a very complex place. I created a simple algorithm.” It is not simply the fact of his solution that has given him celebrity status but also his origins. He was born in 1944, in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg, and studied mathematics “because it was the only thing I could do”. At the Ural State Technical University, where he was an associate professor, he spent his time in the unfashionable field of algebra.

In 1992, Dr Trahtman joined the wave of Jewish migrants who took advantage of the break-up of the Soviet Union to claim Israeli citizenship. While the Israeli Law of Return promised residency to hundreds of thousands of Russians with Jewish ancestry, it did not guarantee their status in the new country. Like many others, Dr Trahtman found himself working as a labourer and security guard before finally finding work as a maths supply teacher. He was given a position as a researcher for Bar-Ilan University after Dr Margolis recommended him to the maths department.

Today, Dr Trahtman rarely travels to Tel Aviv, preferring to work from his home in Jerusalem. It was there that he first came upon the solution.

“I could not believe it. The first thing I did was check it, trying to find the problem. But it was so simple, and there were no problems,” he said.

Dr Trahtman wrote out his solution in pencil on eight sheets of notepaper. “I thought they would not believe that such an old man had done this. Now they talk about my age more than they talk about my solution.”

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