RIP Martin Kruskal (1925-2006)

I just got an e-mail from Norm Zabusky that Martin Kruskal died on December 26th, 2006. A brief obituary can be found here.

Kruskal did a lot of very important mathematical work, but I know him best for coauthoring an old PRL (from back in the day when PRLs were actually both seminal and understandable) with Norm that gave the first mathematical formulation of a soliton. Considering the fact that a huge component of my research involves solitons and solitary waves, we're talking about somebody who did some serious foundational stuff the stuff I study.

I unfortunately never had the chance to meet him. However, let me tell a brief story from the 2006 AMS/MAA Joint Meetings. Thankfully, Martin was around to receive his Steele Prize. I loved the fact that (1) he was the only person on the award podium who wore a t-shirt rather than something fancy and (2) he very humorously commented that the award came 30 years later than it should have. This was one of my major highlights of the meeting.

In the same e-mail, I was informed that another major person who laid the foundations for this field has lung cancer and isn't doing very well. (I'm going to suppress the name in public locations because I don't know how common this knowledge is.)

Because academia is such a small world, a certain component of it (namely, people in the fields I work---and, in some ways, especially people who laid the foundations of the field and whose work everybody knows) is one of my families in many respects. So, while this is not the same as somebody I know personal dying, there is still a strong connection here in other respects.