Joseph Keller

Joseph Bishop Keller
Born	July 31, 1923 Paterson, New Jersey
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	New York University Stanford University
Alma mater	New York University (B.A., 1943) (M.S., 1946) (Ph.D., 1948)
Doctoral advisor	Richard Courant
Doctoral students	George C. Papanicolaou L. Mahadevan
Known for	Geometrical Theory of Diffraction Einstein–Brillouin–Keller method
Notable awards	Eringen Medal (1981) Timoshenko Medal (1984) National Medal of Science (USA) in Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Sciences (1988) Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1996) Wolf Prize (1997)

Joseph Bishop Keller (born July 31, 1923 in Paterson, New Jersey) is an American mathematician who specializes in applied mathematics. He is best known for his work on the "Geometrical Theory of Diffraction" (GTD).^[1]

Education

Keller obtained his PhD in 1948 from New York University under the supervision of Richard Courant. He was a Professor of Mathematics in the Courant Institute at New York University until 1979. Then he was Professor of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University until 1993, when he became Professor Emeritus.

Research

Joseph Keller worked on the application of mathematics to problems in science and engineering, such as wave propagation. He contributed to the Einstein–Brillouin–Keller method for computing eigenvalues in quantum mechanical systems.

Awards and honors

Keller was awarded a Lester R. Ford Award (shared with David W. McLaughlin) in 1976^[2] and unshared in 1977.^[3] In 1988 he was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science, and in 1997 he was awarded the Wolf Prize by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation. In 1996, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. In 1999 he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip. He also won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012 for studying the forces that determine the motion of a human ponytail. This makes him the only person to win more than one Ig Nobel Prize. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[4]

With Patrick B. Warren, Robin C. Ball and Raymond E. Goldstein, Keller was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012 for calculating the forces that shape and move ponytail hair.^[5][6]

Personal life

He has a brother who was also a mathematician, Herbert B. Keller, who has studied numerical analysis, scientific computing, bifurcation theory, path following and homotopy methods, and computational fluid dynamics. Herbert Keller was a professor at Caltech. Both brothers have contributed to the fields of electromagnetics and fluid dynamics.

References

1. Keller, J.B. (1962). "Geometrical theory of diffraction". J. Opt. Soc. Am. 52 (2): 116–130. doi:10.1364/JOSA.52.000116.
2. Keller, Joseph B.; McLaughlin, David W. (1975). "The Feynman Integral". Amer. Math. Monthly 82: 451–465. doi:10.2307/2319736.
3. Keller, Joseph B. (1976). "Inverse Problem". Amer. Math. Monthly 83: 107–118.
4. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-01-27.
5. Goldstein, R.; Warren, P.; Ball, R. (2012). "Shape of a Ponytail and the Statistical Physics of Hair Fiber Bundles" (PDF). Physical Review Letters 108 (7). arXiv:1204.0371. Bibcode:2012PhRvL.108g8101G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.078101.
6. "Ray Goldstein Shares 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics". University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on 2013-02-03.

External links

• Official biography
• Curriculum vitae
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Joseph Keller", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
• Joseph Keller at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• "Interview with Joseph Keller" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society 51 (7): 751–760. August 2004. Retrieved 2008-01-17.