Joseph
Bernard Kruskal, Jr. (born January 29, 1928) is an American
mathematician, statistician, and psychometrician. He was a student at
the University of Chicago and at Princeton University, where he
completed his Ph.D. in 1954, nominally under Albert W. Tucker and
Roger Lyndon, but de facto under Paul Erdős with whom he had two very
short conversations. Kruskal has worked on well-quasi-orderings and
multidimensional scaling.
He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, former
president of the Psychometric Society, and former president of the
Classification Society of North America. He also initiated and was
first president of the Fair Housing Council of South Orange and
Maplewood in 1963, and actively supported civil rights in several
other organizations.
In statistics, Kruskal's most influential work is his seminal
contribution to the formulation of multidimensional scaling. In
computer science, his best known work is Kruskal's algorithm for
computing the minimal spanning tree (MST) of a weighted graph. The
algorithm first orders the edges by weight and then proceeds through
the ordered list adding an edge to the partial MST provided that
adding the new edge does not create a cycle. Minimal spanning trees
have applications to the construction and pricing of communication
networks.
Kruskal was born in New York City to a successful fur wholesaler,
Joseph B. Kruskal, Sr. His mother, Lillian Rose Vorhaus Kruskal
Oppenheimer, became a noted promoter of Origami during the early era
of television.
Joseph Kruskal should not be confused with his two brothers Martin
David Kruskal (1925-2006; co-inventor of solitons and of surreal
numbers) and William Kruskal (1919–2005; developed the Kruskal-Wallis
one-way analysis of variance).
Concepts named after Joseph Kruskal
Kruskal's algorithm (1956)
Kruskal's tree theorem (1960)
Kruskal–Katona theorem (1963) |