Samuel Karlin

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Samuel Karlin
Born(1924-06-08)June 8, 1924

Samuel Karlin (June 8, 1924 – December 18, 2007) was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century.

Education and career

Karlin was born in Janów,

Jewish 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.[3]

Karlin earned his undergraduate degree from

Caltech from 1948 to 1956, before becoming a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford.[3][4]

Throughout his career, Karlin made fundamental contributions to the fields of mathematical economics, bioinformatics, game theory, evolutionary theory, biomolecular sequence analysis, and total positivity.[4] Karlin authored ten books and more than 450 articles. 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.[3]

Honors and awards

Karlin was a member of the

Lester R. Ford Award in 1973.[8] In 1989, President George H. W. Bush bestowed Karlin the National Medal of Science "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."[9] He was elected to the 2002 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.[10]

Personal life

One of Karlin's sons,

Anna R. Karlin, is a theoretical computer scientist, the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.[12]

Selected publications

See also

  • Karlin–McGregor polynomials

References

External links