Gushing down a canal one day in August, 1834, a steady, solitary wave caught the attention of a young Scottish engineer. Taken by the unique formation, he decided to follow it on horseback.
Though the engineer recognized it as an important phenomenon, few others did at the time, and the solitary wave wasn't examined again until the 20th century, Martin Kruskal, a longtime professor at the University, renewed interest in it. He termed the wave a "soliton," formations that are now known to be ubiquitous in nature and crucial for such technologies as fiber optics.
Kruskal, a renowned applied mathematician, died Dec. 26 in his Princeton home, his life reminiscent of a soliton in its unique, purposeful and profound motion. He was 81.
Kruskal received international acclaim for his work on solitons, the theory of relativity and the properties of surreal numbers. Among other honors, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research in 2006. He also received the Maxwell Prize from the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Kruskal saw himself foremost as a researcher. "He just got fascinated by problems and wrestled with them incessantly," Robert MacKay GS '82, a former doctoral student of Kruskal's, said in an e-mail. Always wanting to be prepared for work, Kruskal constantly kept a calculator on his belt, MacKay noted.
After studying at the University of Chicago and New York University, Kruskal came to Princeton in 1951 to study thermonuclear fusion in the then-classified "Project Matterhorn" on fusion energy research. Kruskal then became a professor of astronomy at the University before founding the Program for Applied and Computational Mathematics (PACM) in 1968.
After 10 years as a professor of mathematics, he transferred to emeritus status in 1989, while continuing to serve on the faculty at nearby Rutgers.
During the first years of the PACM, "it was really just [Kruskal]," mechanical and aerospace engineering professor and former PACM director Philip Holmes said. Kruskal spotted promising talent, oversaw independent projects and ran the program with little initial research funding. "He started this program from nothing and built it into a small but quality graduate program," Holmes said.
Kruskal was never satisfied with a simple, neat solution, Ovidiu Costin, a former graduate student of Kruksal's, said. "He was always going further and trying to understand what's behind that proof ... He wanted to understand things very deeply."
Kruskal's personality also endeared him to colleagues and students. "In some ways he was larger than life; he was so enthusiastic," Holmes said, noting that Kruksal was always willing to give students advice.
Though he loved to grapple with complex mathematical problems, Kruskal also had a fun side. For every weekly colloquium Kruskal oversaw while working at PACM, he composed a lighthearted limerick that captured the qualities of the speaker, MacKay recalled.
Kruskal also invented what came to be known as the "Kruskal count," a trick in which a person appears to read another's mind.
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