Samuel Karlin (June 8, 1924 – December 18, 2007) was an American mathematician at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

in the late 20th century.

Biography

Karlin was born in Janów,

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

and immigrated to

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

as a child. Raised in an Orthodox

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

household, Karlin became an atheist in his teenage years and remained an atheist for the rest of his life. Later in life he told his three children, who all became scientists, that walking down the street without a yarmulke on his head for the first time was a milestone in his life. Karlin earned his undergraduate degree from

Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has prog ...

; and then his doctorate in mathematics from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

in 1947 (at the age of 22) under the supervision of

Salomon Bochner Salomon Bochner (20 August 1899 – 2 May 1982) was an Austrian mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis, probability theory and differential geometry. Life He was born into a Jewish family in Podgórze (near Kraków), then ...

. He was on the faculty of

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

from 1948 to 1956, before becoming a professor of mathematics and statistics at

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...

.Sam Karlin, influential math professor, dead at 83
Throughout his career, Karlin made fundamental contributions to the fields of mathematical economics,

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

, game theory, evolutionary theory, biomolecular sequence analysis, and total positivity. He did extensive work in mathematical population genetics. In the early 1990s, Karlin and Stephen Altschul developed the Karlin-Altschul statistics, a basis for the highly used sequence similarity software program

BLAST Blast or The Blast may refer to: *Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film), ...

. Karlin authored ten books and more than 450 articles. Karlin was a member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

, the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

, and the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

. He won a Lester R. Ford Award in 1973. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush bestowed Karlin the

National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social scienc ...

"for his broad and remarkable research in mathematical analysis, probability theory and mathematical statistics, and in the application of these ideas to mathematical economics, mechanics, and population genetics." He was elected to the 2002 class of

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

s of the

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international society for practitioners in the fields of operations research (O.R.), management science, and analytics. It was established in 1995 with the merger o ...

. One of his sons, Kenneth D. Karlin, is a professor of

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the elements that make up matter to the compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions: their composition, structure, proper ...

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...

and the 2009 winner of the

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all ...

's F. Albert Cotton Award for Synthetic Chemistry. His other son, Manuel, is a physician in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous ...

. His daughter, Anna R. Karlin, is a theoretical computer scientist, the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seatt ...

.Anna Karlin's faculty web page at U. Washington
retrieved 2011-01-16.

Selected publications

* * * S. Karlin and H. M. Taylor. ''A First Course in Stochastic Processes.'' Academic Press, 1975 (second edition). * S. Karlin and H. M. Taylor. ''A Second Course in Stochastic Processes.'' Academic Press, 1981. * S. Karlin and H. M. Taylor. ''An Introduction to Stochastic Modeling, Third Edition.'' Academic Press, 1998. * S. Karlin, D. Eisenberg, and R. Altman. ''Bioinformatics: Unsolved Problems and Challenges.'' National Academic Press Inc., 2005. . * S. Karlin (Ed.). ''Econometrics, Time Series, and Multivariate Statistics.'' Academic Press, 1983. . * S. Karlin (Author) and E. Nevo (Editor). ''Evolutionary Processes and Theory.'' Academic Press, 1986. . * S. Karlin. ''Mathematical Methods and Theory in Games, Programming, and Economics.'' Dover Publications, 1992. . * S. Karlin and E. Nevo (Eds.). ''Population Genetics and Ecology.'' Academic Press, 1976. . * S. Karlin and W. J. Studden. ''Tchebycheff systems: With applications in analysis and statistics (pure and applied mathematics).'' Interscience Publishers, 1966 (1st edition). ASIN B0006BNV2C. * S Karlin and S. Lessard. ''Theoretical Studies on Sex Ratio Evolution.'' Princeton University Press, 1986. * S. Karlin. ''Theory of Infinite Games.'' Addison Wesley Longman Ltd. Inc., 1959. ASIN B000SNID12. * S. Karlin. ''Total Positivity, Vol. 1.'' Stanford, 1968. ASIN B000LZG0Xu. * *

References

* * *

External links

"Math in the News: Mathematician Sam Karlin, Known for Contributions in Computational Biology, has Died."
Math Gateway of the Mathematical Association of America, February 5, 2008. * * *
Obituary, I.M.S. Bulletin, May 2008

Biography of Samuel Karlin
from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences {{DEFAULTSORT:Karlin, Samuel National Medal of Science laureates Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences John von Neumann Theory Prize winners American geneticists Probability theorists American operations researchers Game theorists Mathematical economists Functional analysts 20th-century American mathematicians Stanford University Department of Mathematics faculty Stanford University Department of Statistics faculty Princeton University alumni Illinois Institute of Technology alumni Jewish American atheists American people of Polish-Jewish descent Polish emigrants to the United States 1924 births 2007 deaths Members of the American Philosophical Society

Biography

Selected publications

See also

References

External links