Daniel Kleitman | |
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Born | |
Education |
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Spouse | Sharon Ruth Alexander |
Children | 3 |
Scientific career | |
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Thesis | Static Properties of Heavy Fermi-Particles; Deuteron-Nucleon Scattering at High Enery (1958) |
Doctoral advisor | |
Website | math |
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.
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]
In 1973 Kleitman was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [9]
In 2024 Kleitman was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. [10]
On July 26, 1964 Kleitman married Sharon Ruth Alexander. They have three children. [1]