Martin Kruskal

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Martin David Kruskal (born September 28, 1925 in New York, died December 26, 2006) was an American mathematician and physicist. He was a student at the University of Chicago and at New York University, where he completed his Ph.D. under Richard Courant in 1952. Kruskal worked at Princeton University for many years, and later at Rutgers University. He worked on asymptotics, solitons and surreal numbers. With George Szekeres, he introduced the Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates in the Kerr vacuum solution to the Einstein field equation. He invented the Kruskal counting procedure, which introduced magicians to the world of Markov chains. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 1980) and a 1993 recipient of the National Medal of Science. In 2006 Kruskal won the Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research. [1]

Kruskal was born in New York City to a successful fur wholesaler, Joseph B. Kruskal, Sr. His mother, Lillian Rose Vorhaus Kruskal Oppenheimer, became a noted promoter of Origami during the early era of television.

Not to be confused with his two brothers Joseph Kruskal (born 1928; the discoverer of multidimensional scaling and Kruskal's algorithm) and William Kruskal (born 1919; discovered the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance).

[edit] External links

• In Memoriam: Martin David Kruskal
• The Kruskal Count
• Martin Kruskal at the Mathematics Genealogy Project