Biography:Daniel Kleitman
Daniel J. Kleitman (born October 4, 1934)[1][2][3] is an American mathematician and professor of applied mathematics at MIT. His research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, genomics, and operations research.
Biography
Kleitman was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York,[1] the younger of Bertha and Milton Kleitman's two sons. His father was a lawyer who after WWII became a commodities trader and investor. In 1942 the family moved to Morristown, New Jersey,[4] and he graduated from Morristown High School in 1950.[1]
Kleitman then attended Cornell University, from which he graduated in 1954,[1] and received his PhD in Physics from Harvard University in 1958 under Nobel Laureates Julian Schwinger and Roy Glauber.[5] He is the "k" in G. W. Peck, a pseudonym for a group of six mathematicians that includes Kleitman. Formerly a physics professor at Brandeis University,[6] Kleitman was encouraged by Paul Erdős to change his field of study to mathematics. Perhaps humorously, Erdős once asked him, "Why are you only a physicist?"[1]
Kleitman joined the applied mathematics faculty at MIT in 1966, and was promoted to professor in 1969.[6]
Kleitman coauthored at least six papers with Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 1.
He was a math advisor and extra for the film Good Will Hunting.[7] Since Minnie Driver, who appeared in Good Will Hunting, also appeared in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon, Kleitman has a Bacon number of 2. Adding the two numbers results in an Erdős–Bacon number of 3, which is a tie with Bruce Reznick for the lowest number anyone has.[8]
Personal life
On July 26, 1964 Kleitman married Sharon Ruth Alexander. They have three children.[1]
Selected publications
- Kleitman, Daniel (1966). "On a combinatorial problem of Erdős". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 17: 139–141. doi:10.1090/s0002-9939-1966-0184866-9.
- Kleitman, Daniel (1969). "On Dedekind's problem: The number of monotone Boolean functions". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 21 (3): 677–682. doi:10.1090/s0002-9939-1969-0241334-6.
- Kleitman, Daniel; Rothschild, Bruce (1970). "The number of finite topologies". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 25 (2): 276–282. doi:10.1090/s0002-9939-1970-0253944-9.
- Erdős, Paul; Kleitman, Daniel (1971). "On collections of subsets containing 4-member Boolean algebras". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 28: 87–90. doi:10.1090/s0002-9939-1971-0270924-9.
- Kleitman, Daniel J.; Rothschild, Bruce L. (1975). "Asymptotic enumeration of partial orders on a finite set". Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 205: 205–220. doi:10.1090/s0002-9947-1975-0369090-9. http://dml.cz/bitstream/handle/10338.dmlcz/126183/MathBohem_122-1997-1_7.pdf.
- Kleitman, Daniel; Markowsky, George (1975). "On Dedekind's problem: The number of isotone Boolean functions. II". Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 213: 373–390. doi:10.1090/s0002-9947-1975-0382107-0.
- Kleitman, Daniel J.; Rothschild, Bruce R.; Spencer, Joel H. (1976). "The number of semigroups of order n". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 55 (1): 227–232. doi:10.1090/s0002-9939-1976-0414380-0.[9]
- Kalai, Gil; Kleitman, Daniel J. (1992). "A quasi-polynomial bound for the diameter of graphs of polyhedra". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 26 (2): 315–316. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1992-00285-9.
- Alon, Noga; Kleitman, Daniel J. (1992). "Piercing convex sets". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 27 (2): 252–256. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1992-00304-x.
- Coventry, Alex; Kleitman, Daniel J.; Berger, Bonnie (2004). "MSARI: Multiple sequence alignments for statistical detection of RNA secondary structure". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 101 (33): 12102–12107. doi:10.1073/pnas.0404193101. PMID 15304649. Bibcode: 2004PNAS..10112102C.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Peck, G. W. (2002). "Kleitman and Combinatorics: A Celebration". Discrete Mathematics 257 (2–3): 193–224. doi:10.1016/S0012-365X(02)00595-2. (article available on Douglas West's web page, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign).
- ↑ "Kleitman, Daniel J.," in: Who's Who in Frontier Science and Technology, 1, 1984, p. 396.
- ↑ Kleitman, Daniel J in American Men of Science, vol. 4, 2009
- ↑ Kevin Coughlin (July 25, 2012). "New park, plus tree plan, make for sunny summer day on Hillcrest Avenue in Morristown". https://morristowngreen.com/2012/07/25/new-park-plus-tree-plan-make-for-sunny-summer-day-on-hillcrest-avenue-in-morristown..
- ↑ Daniel Kleitman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "MIT Mathematics - Daniel Kleitman". www-math.mit.edu. http://www-math.mit.edu/people/profile.php?pid=135.
- ↑ Daniel J. Kleitman, "My Career in the Movies,", Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 45, 502 (April 1998)
- ↑ Grossman, Jerry. "Items of Interest Related to Erdös Numbers". Oakland University. https://oakland.edu/enp/related/.
- ↑ The publication states "Bruce R. Rothschild", a typographical error for "Bruce L. Rothschild".
External links
- Kleitman's homepage
- Peck, G. W. (2002). "Kleitman and Combinatorics: A Celebration". Discrete Mathematics 257 (2–3): 193–224. doi:10.1016/S0012-365X(02)00595-2. (article available on Douglas West's web page, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign)
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