Samuel Karlin

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

Life and work

Karlin was born as the son of Orthodox Jews in Poland and grew up in Chicago ( the family moved already in the U.S. when he was two months old ). He studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology and received his PhD in 1947 at Salomon Bochner at Princeton University (Independent Functions). 1948 to 1956 he taught at Caltech and then became a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford University. He also worked in the 1950s for the RAND Corporation.

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

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

Karlin was a member of the National Academy of Sciences ( since 1973) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1989 he received the National Medal of Science. In 1987 he was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize.

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

Writings

• 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