Interdisciplinary Meandering in Science

abstract mathematics. My mentor was Professor S. Bochner, a distinguished contributor to harmonic analysis. My classmates included Richard Bellman (who later nurtured the method of dynamic programming), Kai Lai Chung (of Markov chain lore), Ted Harris (who developed broadly branching stochastic processes and their applications), Gil Hunt (who set the foundations of strong Markov processes, now commonly called Hunt processes), and Paul Meier (an applied statistician, known as the pioneer of the nonparametric Kaplan-Meier test). When I completed my degree in 1947, Professor S. Lefschetz, chairman of the Princeton mathematics department, selected me for the job of becoming the first Cal Tech Bateman Fellow. I was the youngest Ph.D. that year and did as I was told, although secretly I was happy to go to California. So, in September 1947, I got married and moved to Cal Tech. I labored that first year on mathematical problems of Banach spaces (e.g., bases h spaces, normed rings), continuing ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: IOR
• Authors: Samuel Karlin
• Keywords: Cal Tech, Cal Tech Bateman, IOR 2002, Kai Lai Chung