Martin David Kruskal

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

Life and work

Martin David Kruskal studied at the University of Chicago ( completion 1945) and New York University and received his doctorate there in Richard Courant 1952 Ph. D. in mathematics. From 1951 he was involved in early trials for thermonuclear fusion reactors (Project Matterhorn, then still secret) involved in the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton and many important contributions to theoretical plasma physics come from him ( BGK modes with John Greene and Ira B. Bernstein 1957 and others). Kruskal taught from 1959 Astronomy in Princeton, where he became Professor of Astronomy in 1961, started there as well in 1968 a program of applied mathematics. After his retirement in 1989 he accepted a chair of mathematics at Rutgers University. Mid-1950s, he led the Kruskal- Szekeres coordinates (also simply called Kruskal coordinates) in the Schwarzschild metric. He showed this John Archibald Wheeler, but later realized its importance and in 1959 lectured about it. Independently found this then also Christian Fronsdal (1959 ) and the Australian- Hungarian mathematician George Szekeres ( 1961). Kruskal regarded as 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 found with other a general solution method (Inverse Scattering Transform).

He invented the " Kruskal Count ," a card trick that is based on the Markov chain. He also like his wife was an origami expert. Kruskal also dealt with Conway's theory of surreal numbers. He was from 1980 a member of the National Academy of Sciences and from 1993 support the National Medal of Science. In 2006 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society with John Greene, Robert Miura, Clifford Gardner for their development of the inverse scattering transform for the solution of Soliton Equations. In 1983 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.

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

His doctoral counts Steven Orszag.

Publications

  • Kruskal: Maximal extension of the Schwarzschild metric. In: Physical Review. Volume 119, 1960, p 1743rd ( Kruskal coordinates, online, PDF file, 523 kB, called 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: Korteweg -de Vries equation and generalizations VI. Methods for exact solution. In: Communications in 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 )
December 26 Princeton (New Jersey) John M. Greene Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates Clifford S. Gardner Joseph Kruskal William Kruskal
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