Kenneth Appel
| Kenneth Ira Appel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 8, 1932 Brooklyn, New York |
| Died | April 19, 2013 (aged 80) Dover, New Hampshire |
| Residence | New Hampshire |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | Graph theory, Combinatorics, Topology |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of New Hampshire |
| Alma mater |
B.S. - Queens College, City University of New York Doctor of Philosophy - University of Michigan |
| Doctoral advisor | Roger Lyndon |
| Known for | Proving the Four-color theorem with Wolfgang Haken |
| Notable awards | Fulkerson Prize [1979] |
Kenneth Ira Appel (October 8, 1932 – April 19, 2013) was an American mathematician who in 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color.
Appel was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 8, 1932, and he died in Dover, New Hampshire, on April 19, 2013, after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer in October 2012. He grew up in Queens, New York, and was the son of Irwin Appel and Lillian Sender Appel. He worked as an actuary for a brief time and then served in the U.S. Army for two years at Fort Benning, Georgia, and in Baumholder, Germany. In 1959, he finished his doctoral program at the University of Michigan, and he also married Carole S. Stein in Philadelphia. The couple moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Kenneth worked for the Institute for Defense Analyses from 1959 to 1961. His main work at the Institute for Defense Analyses was doing research in cryptography. Toward the end of his life, in 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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