Martin David Kruskal

Martin David Kruskal (September 28, 1925 – December 26, 2006) was an American mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions in many areas of mathematics and science, ranging from plasma physics to general relativity and from nonlinear analysis to asymptotic analysis. His single most celebrated contribution was the discovery and theory of solitons.

He was a student at the University of Chicago and at New York University, where he completed his Ph.D. under Richard Courant in 1952. He spent much of his career at Princeton University, as a research scientist at the Plasma Physics Laboratory starting in 1951, and then as a professor of astronomy (1961), founder and chair of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics (1968), and professor of mathematics (1979). He retired from Princeton University in 1989 and joined the mathematics department of Rutgers University, holding the David Hilbert Chair of Mathematics.

Apart from his research, Kruskal was known as a mentor of younger scientists. He worked tirelessly and always aimed not just to prove a result but to understand it thoroughly. And he was notable for his playfulness. He invented the Kruskal Count, a magical effect that has been known to perplex professional magicians because – as he liked to say – it was based not on sleight of hand but on a mathematical phenomenon.