- Joseph Kruskal
Joseph Bernard Kruskal, Jr. (born
January 29 1928 ) is an Americanmathematician ,statistician , andpsychometrician . He was a student at theUniversity of Chicago and atPrinceton University , where he completed his Ph.D. in 1954, nominally underAlbert W. Tucker andRoger Lyndon , but de facto underPaul Erdős with whom he had two very short conversations. Kruskal has worked onwell-quasi-ordering s andmultidimensional scaling .He is a Fellow of the
American Statistical Association , former president of thePsychometric Society , and former president of theClassification Society of North America . He also initiated and was first president of the Fair Housing Council of South Orange and Maplewood in 1963, and actively supported civil rights in several other organizations.In statistics, Kruskal's most influential work is his seminal contribution to the formulation of
multidimensional scaling . In computer science, his best known work isKruskal's algorithm for computing theminimal spanning tree (MST) of aweighted graph . The algorithm first orders the edges by weight and then proceeds through the ordered list adding an edge to the partial MST provided that adding the new edge does not create a cycle. Minimal spanning trees have applications to the construction and pricing of communication networks.Kruskal was born in
New York City to a successful fur wholesaler, Joseph B. Kruskal, Sr. His mother,Lillian Rose Vorhaus Kruskal Oppenheimer , became a noted promoter ofOrigami during the early era of television.Joseph Kruskal should not be confused with his two brothers Martin David Kruskal (1925-2006; co-inventor of
soliton s and ofsurreal number s) andWilliam Kruskal (1919–2005; developed theKruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance ).Concepts named after Joseph Kruskal
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Kruskal's algorithm (1956)
*Kruskal's tree theorem (1960)
*Kruskal–Katona theorem (1963)External links
*MathGenealogy |id=7714
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