Esteemed Mathematician Martin Kruskal Dies at 81

January 15, 2007

Martin D. Kruskal, a world-famous mathematician and mathematical physicist, died December 26 in Princeton, N.J., at age 81. He was a member of the MAA and the AMS.

Martin Kruskal is perhaps most well known for his work in initiating the "soliton revolution", called one of the great mathematical advances of the last half century. He and physicist Norman Zabusky discovered nonlinear waves that behave much like linear waves, which they termed "solitons". Solitons are now known to be ubiquitous in nature, their properties forming a basis for computing and for communications, such as in undersea fiber optic cables.

Kruskal also helped to devise a method to solve the equations underlying solitons, called the Inverse Scattering Transform (IST), which has influenced pure and applied mathematics. Nonlinear partial differential equations were once thought to be unsolvable.

After earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, Kruskal received his Ph.D. in 1952 under Richard Courant at New York University. A year earlier, Kruskal had started his career as a research scientist, at Princeton's Plasma Physics Laboratory, on Project Matterhorn -- then a top-secret project on controlled thermonuclear fusion.

In 1979, Kruskal was named a professor of mathematics at Princeton. He was also a faculty member at Rutgers University, where he held the David Hilbert Chair of Mathematics. In later years, Kruskal devoted himself to the study of surreal numbers and nonlinear partial differential equations. He influenced a generation of young mathematicians. Most notably, Kruskal had eye for students of great talent. One of them was future Fields Medalist Ed Witten.

Martin Kruskal came from a family of mathematicians. William, an older brother, is best known for the Kruskal-Wallis test, which is part of every major statistical computation system. Joseph, his younger brother, is known for Kruskal's Algorithm in computer science, the Kruskal Tree Theorem on well-quasi-orderings, and the formulation of multidimensional scaling.

Martin Kruskal was the recipient of, among many awards, the National Medal of Science, awarded by President Clinton in 1993; the 2006 Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research and the Gibbs Lectureship, both from the AMS; and the Maxwell Prize from the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Kruskal was awarded memberships in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.