Martin Kruskal

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Martin Kruskal (standing) in Crete 1983

Martin David Kruskal (born September 28, 1925 in New York , † December 26, 2006 in Princeton ) was an American mathematician and physicist .

Life

Martin David Kruskal studied at the University of Chicago (completion 1945) and the New York University and received his doctorate there with Richard Courant 1952 Ph. D. in mathematics . From 1951 he was involved in early experiments on thermonuclear fusion reactors ( Matterhorn project , at that time still secret) at the plasma physics laboratory in Princeton and he made many important contributions to theoretical plasma physics ( BGK modes with John Greene and Ira B. Bernstein 1957 and others). Kruskal taught astronomy in Princeton from 1959 and became professor of astronomy there in 1961, but also started a program for applied mathematics there from 1968. After his retirement in 1989, he accepted a chair in mathematics at Rutgers University . In the mid-1950s he introduced the Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates (also simply called Kruskal coordinates) in the Schwarzschild metric . He showed them to John Archibald Wheeler , who only later recognized their importance and presented them in 1959. Christian Fronsdal (1959) and the Australian-Hungarian mathematician George Szekeres (1961) found this independent . Kruskal is considered one of the pioneers in the field of solitons (special stable solutions of nonlinear wave equations such as the Korteweg-de-Vries equation ), where he and others found a general solution method (inverse scattering transform).

He invented the "Kruskal Count", a card trick based on the Markov chain . Like his wife, he was also an origami expert. Kruskal also dealt with Conway's theory of surreal numbers . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences from 1980 and of the National Medal of Science from 1993 . In 2006 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society with John Greene , Robert Miura , and Clifford Gardner for their development of the inverse scattering transform for solving soliton equations . In 1983 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics . In the same year he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1997 he was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society .

His two brothers, Joseph ( Kruskal algorithm in computer science) and William ( Kruskal-Wallis test in statistics) were also mathematicians. Kruskal had been married since 1950 and had three children.

Steven Orszag is one of his PhD students .

Publications

  • Kruskal: Maximal extension of the Schwarzschild Metric. In: Physical Review. Volume 119, 1960, p. 1743. (Kruskal coordinates, online ( Memento from May 15, 2003 in the Internet Archive ), PDF file; 523 kB, accessed on October 17, 2009)
  • Kruskal, Norman Zabusky : Interaction of solitons in a collisionless plasma and the recurrence of initial states. In: Physical Review Letters. Volume 15, 1965, pp. 240-243. (Solitons)
  • Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, Miura: Method for Solving the Korteweg-deVries Equation , Physical Review Letters, Volume 19, 1967, pp. 1095-1097
  • Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, Miura: Korteweg-de Vries equation and generalizations VI. Methods for exact solution. In: Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. Volume 27, 1974, pp. 97-133. (inverse scattering transform)
  • Bernstein, Greene, Kruskal: Exact nonlinear plasma oscillations. In: Physical Review. Volume 108, 1957, p. 546. (BGK modes)

literature

  • Martin Gardner: Kruskal's card trick. In: Scientific American. February 1978. (also in Gardner: From Penrose tiles to trapdoor ciphers. 1989.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jeffrey C. Lagarias, Eric Rains, Robert J. Vanderbei: The Kruskal Count (last accessed on May 4, 2007; PDF; 188 kB).
  2. ^ American Mathematical Society: Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, Miura Receive 2006 AMS Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research (last accessed May 4, 2007).
  3. ^ Entry on Kruskal, Martin David (1925 - 2006) in the archive of the Royal Society , London
personal data
SURNAME Kruskal, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kruskal, Martin David (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 28, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 2006
Place of death Princeton