Samuel Karlin
1924-Dec. 18, 2007
Stanford, California

Samuel Karlin, 83, a Stanford University professor emeritus of mathematics, died Dec. 18 at Stanford Hospital after suffering a heart attack.

He was born in Yanovo, Poland, in 1924. He earned his doctorate degree from Princeton in 1947 and was on the Cal Tech faculty from 1948 before coming to Stanford in 1956. His math work was important in early efforts in genome sequencing. Although frail in recent years, he kept up his habit of hard work "until the end," according to Rafe Mazzeo, chairman of the Mathematics Department.

"He was a real pioneer in applying mathematics to genome sequencing," Mazzeo said.

His contributions to mathematics were in mathematic economics, bioinformatics, probability, evolutionary theory, biomolecular sequence analysis and a field of matrix study known as "total positivity."

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1989. He was the author of 10 books and more than 450 scholarly articles. He is survived by his wife, Dorit Karlin; children, Anna, Kenneth and Manuel; and eight grandchildren.

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