Samuel Karlin
| Samuel Karlin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 8, 1924 Janów, Lublin Province, Second Polish Republic |
| Died | December 18, 2007 (aged 83) Palo Alto, California, United States |
| Citizenship | American |
| Nationality | Poland |
| Fields |
mathematical sciences population genetics |
| Institutions | Stanford University |
| Alma mater |
Illinois Institute of Technology Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Salomon Bochner |
| Doctoral students |
Christopher Burge Thomas LIggett John W. Pratt |
| Known for |
BLAST Karlin-Rubin theorem (UMP tests of monotone likelihoods) geometry of moments Total positivity Tchebycheff systems Optimal experiments |
| Notable awards |
National Medal of Science (1989) John von Neumann Theory Prize (1987) |
Samuel Karlin (June 8, 1924 – December 18, 2007) was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century.
Karlin was born in Janów, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Karlin became an atheist in his teenage years and remained an atheist for the rest of his life.
Karlin earned his undergraduate degree from Illinois Institute of Technology; and then his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1947 (at the age of 22) under the supervision of Salomon Bochner. He was on the faculty of Caltech from 1948 to 1956, before becoming a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford.
Throughout his career, Karlin made fundamental contributions to the fields of mathematical economics, bioinformatics, 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.
Karlin authored ten books and more than 450 articles. Karlin was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He won a Lester R. Ford Award in 1973. 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."
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