Samuel Karlin

Samuel Karlin (born June 8, 1924 in Yonova , Poland , † December 18, 2007 in Palo Alto , California ) was an American mathematician who dealt in particular with applications of mathematics in population genetics and molecular biology , game theory and statistics.

Live and act

Karlin was born in Poland to Orthodox Jews and grew up in Chicago (the family moved to the United States when he was two months old). He studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology and received his doctorate in 1947 under Salomon Bochner at Princeton University (Independent Functions). From 1948 to 1956 he taught at Caltech and then became Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University . He also worked for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s .

Karlin dealt with mathematical economics, bioinformatics, game theory (with applications in military matters at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s), mathematical evolution theory, mathematics of sequence analysis in molecular biology, but especially with population genetics. The statistical method of comparing DNA sequences, developed by him and Stephen Altschul in the 1990s, named after them, serves as the basis of the widely used sequence analysis program BLAST .

In 2001 he publicly criticized the University of Berkeley and the biotechnology company Celera Genomics for numerous errors in the genetic analysis of Drosophila.

Karlin was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 1972), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1970) and the American Philosophical Society (since 1995). In 1989 he received the National Medal of Science and in 1987 the John von Neumann Theory Prize .

His son Kenneth Karlin, with whom he also published, is a chemistry professor at Johns Hopkins University .

Fonts

• Mathematical Methods and Theory in Games, Programming, and Economics (2 volumes), Addison-Wesley, 1959, Dover Publications, 2003 (new edition in one volume), ISBN 0-486-49527-2
  • I. Matrix Games, Programming, and Mathematical Economics
  • II. The Theory of Infinite Games
• with William J. Studden: Tchebycheff systems: With applications in analysis and statistics , Interscience Publishers, 1966
• Total positivity. Volume I , Stanford University Press, 1968
• with Howard M. Taylor: A First Course in Stochastic Processes , 2nd Edition, Academic Press, 1975
• with Eviatar Nevo (Ed.): Population Genetics and Ecology , Academic Press, 1976
• with Howard M. Taylor: A Second Course in Stochastic Processes , Academic Press, 1981
• as editor: Econometrics, Time Series, and Multivariate Statistics , Academic Press, 1983
• with Howard M. Taylor: An Introduction to Stochastic Modeling , Academic Press, 1984 1994 (2nd edition) 1998 (3rd edition)
• Mathematical models, problems and controversies of evolutionary theories , Bulletin of the AMS 10, 1984, pp. 221-273
• with Sabin Lessard: Theoretical Studies on Sex Ratio Evolution , Princeton University Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-691-08412-1
• with Eviatar Nevo (Ed.): Evolutionary Processes and Theory , Academic Press, 1986
• with Stephen F. Altschul: Methods for assessing the statistical significance of molecular sequence features by using general scoring schemes , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87, 1990, pp. 2264-2268
• with Stephen F. Altschul: Applications and statistics for multiple high-scoring segments in molecular sequences , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 90, 1993, pp. 5873-5877
• with David Eisenberg, Russ Altman (eds.): Frontiers of Bioinformatics: Unsolved Problems and Challenges , The National Academies Press, 2005

literature

• Sam Karlin, mathematician who improved DNA analysis, dies , Stanford Report, Jan 16, 2008
• Douglas Martin: Samuel Karlin, Versatile Mathematician, Dies at 83 (obituary), New York Times, February 21, 2008 (English)

Web links

• Samuel Karlin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member History: Samuel Karlin. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 18, 2018 .