Samuel Karlin

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title: "Samuel Karlin" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["national-medal-of-science-laureates", "members-of-the-united-states-national-academy-of-sciences", "fellows-of-the-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences", "fellows-of-the-institute-for-operations-research-and-the-management-sciences", "john-von-neumann-theory-prize-winners", "american-geneticists", "probability-theorists", "american-operations-researchers", "game-theorists", "mathematical-economists", "functional-analysts", "stanford-university-department-of-mathematics-faculty", "stanford-university-department-of-statistics-faculty", "princeton-university-alumni", "illinois-institute-of-technology-alumni", "jewish-american-atheists", "american-atheists", "american-people-of-polish-jewish-descent", "polish-emigrants-to-the-united-states", "1924-births", "2007-deaths", "members-of-the-american-philosophical-society", "20th-century-american-statisticians"] description: "Polish American mathematician" topic_path: "science/mathematics" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Karlin" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Polish American mathematician ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox scientist"]

Field	Value
name	Samuel Karlin
image_size	150px
caption	Samuel Karlin
birth_date
birth_place	Janów, Lublin Province, Second Polish Republic
death_date
death_place	Palo Alto, California, US
residence
nationality	Polish
field	mathematical sciences
population genetics
work_institutions	Stanford University
alma_mater	Illinois Institute of Technology
Princeton University
doctoral_advisor	Salomon Bochner
doctoral_students	Christopher Burge{{Cite journal
last1	Burge
first1	Christopher
author-link1	Christopher Burge
last2	Karlin
first2	Samuel
author-link2	Samuel Karlin
title	Prediction of complete gene structures in human genomic DNA
doi	10.1006/jmbi.1997.0951
journal	Journal of Molecular Biology
volume	268
issue	1
pages	78–94
year	1997
pmid	9149143
url	https://ai.stanford.edu/~serafim/cs262/Papers/GENSCAN.pdf
url-status	dead
archive-url	https://web.archive.org/web/20150620094015/https://ai.stanford.edu/~serafim/cs262/Papers/GENSCAN.pdf
archive-date	2015-06-20
citeseerx	10.1.1.115.3107
known_for	BLAST
Karlin-Rubin theorem (UMP tests of monotone likelihoods)
geometry of moments
* Artstein's article has been republished in a festschrift by students of Robert J. Aumann: {{cite book	first1
Total positivity
Tchebycheff systems
Optimal experiments
author_abbrev_bot
prizes	National Medal of Science (1989)
John von Neumann Theory Prize (1987)
religion
::

|name = Samuel Karlin |image = |image_size = 150px |caption = Samuel Karlin |birth_date = |birth_place = Janów, Lublin Province, Second Polish Republic |death_date = |death_place = Palo Alto, California, US |residence = |citizenship = American |nationality = Polish |ethnicity = |field = mathematical sciences population genetics |work_institutions = Stanford University |alma_mater = Illinois Institute of Technology Princeton University |doctoral_advisor = Salomon Bochner |doctoral_students = Christopher Burge{{Cite journal |last1 = Burge |first1 = Christopher |author-link1 = Christopher Burge |last2 = Karlin |first2 = Samuel |author-link2 = Samuel Karlin |title = Prediction of complete gene structures in human genomic DNA |doi = 10.1006/jmbi.1997.0951 |journal = Journal of Molecular Biology |volume = 268 |issue = 1 |pages = 78–94 |year = 1997 |pmid = 9149143 |url = https://ai.stanford.edu/~serafim/cs262/Papers/GENSCAN.pdf |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20150620094015/https://ai.stanford.edu/~serafim/cs262/Papers/GENSCAN.pdf |archive-date = 2015-06-20 |citeseerx = 10.1.1.115.3107 |known_for = BLAST Karlin-Rubin theorem (UMP tests of monotone likelihoods) geometry of moments

• Artstein's article has been republished in a festschrift by students of Robert J. Aumann:
  Total positivity
  Tchebycheff systems Optimal experiments |author_abbrev_bot =|author_abbrev_zoo = |influences = |influenced = |prizes = National Medal of Science (1989) John von Neumann Theory Prize (1987) |religion = |footnotes = |signature = Samuel Karlin (June 8, 1924 – December 18, 2007) was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century.

Education and career

Karlin was born in Janów, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Karlin became an atheist in his teenage years and remained an atheist for the rest of his life. Later in life he told his three children, who all became scientists, that walking down the street without a yarmulke on his head for the first time was a milestone in his life.{{cite web |website=Stanford.edu |url=https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-karlin_obit-012308.html |title=Sam Karlin, mathematician who improved DNA analysis, dead at 83 |author=Dan Stober |date=January 16, 2008 |access-date=July 16, 2019 |archive-date=June 12, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160612093401/http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-karlin_obit-012308.html |url-status=dead

Karlin earned his undergraduate degree from Illinois Institute of Technology; and then his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1947 (at the age of 22) under the supervision of Salomon Bochner. He was on the faculty of Caltech from 1948 to 1956, before becoming a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford.

Throughout his career, Karlin made fundamental contributions to the fields of mathematical economics, bioinformatics, game theory, evolutionary theory, biomolecular sequence analysis, and total positivity. Karlin authored ten books and more than 450 articles. He did extensive work in mathematical population genetics. In the early 1990s, Karlin and Stephen Altschul developed the Karlin-Altschul statistics, a basis for the highly used sequence similarity software program BLAST.

Honors and awards

Karlin was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He won a Lester R. Ford Award in 1973. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush bestowed Karlin the National Medal of Science "for his broad and remarkable research in mathematical analysis, probability theory and mathematical statistics, and in the application of these ideas to mathematical economics, mechanics, and population genetics." He was elected to the 2002 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

Personal life

One of Karlin's sons, Kenneth D. Karlin, is a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University and the 2009 winner of the American Chemical Society's F. Albert Cotton Award for Synthetic Chemistry. His other son, Manuel, is a physician in Portland, Oregon. His daughter, Anna R. Karlin, is a theoretical computer scientist, the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Selected publications

• S. Karlin and H. M. Taylor. A First Course in Stochastic Processes. Academic Press, 1975 (second edition).
• S. Karlin and H. M. Taylor. A Second Course in Stochastic Processes. Academic Press, 1981.
• S. Karlin and H. M. Taylor. An Introduction to Stochastic Modeling, Third Edition. Academic Press, 1998.
• S. Karlin, D. Eisenberg, and R. Altman. Bioinformatics: Unsolved Problems and Challenges. National Academic Press Inc., 2005. .
• S. Karlin (Ed.). Econometrics, Time Series, and Multivariate Statistics. Academic Press, 1983. .
• S. Karlin (Author) and E. Nevo (Editor). Evolutionary Processes and Theory. Academic Press, 1986. .
• S. Karlin. Mathematical Methods and Theory in Games, Programming, and Economics. Dover Publications, 1992. .
• S. Karlin and E. Nevo (Eds.). Population Genetics and Ecology. Academic Press, 1976. .
• S. Karlin and W. J. Studden. Tchebycheff systems: With applications in analysis and statistics (pure and applied mathematics). Interscience Publishers, 1966 (1st edition). ASIN B0006BNV2C.
• S Karlin and S. Lessard. Theoretical Studies on Sex Ratio Evolution. Princeton University Press, 1986.
• S. Karlin. Theory of Infinite Games. Addison Wesley Longman Ltd. Inc., 1959. ASIN B000SNID12.
• S. Karlin. Total Positivity, Vol. 1. Stanford, 1968. ASIN B000LZG0Xu.

References

References

1. [http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/karlin-010908.html Sam Karlin, influential math professor, dead at 83] {{webarchive. link. (2008-05-12)
2. "Samuel Karlin".
3. "Samuel Karlin".
4. "APS Member History".
5. Karlin, Samuel. (1972). "Some mathematical models of population genetics". Amer. Math. Monthly.
6. [https://www.nsf.gov/od/nms/recip_details.cfm?recip_id=187 US NSF - The President's National Medal of Science: Recipient Details]
7. "Fellows: Alphabetical List". [[Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences]].
8. [http://www.jhu.edu/~chem/karlin/ Kenneth Karlin's web site at JHU], retrieved 2011-01-16.
9. [http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/karlin/ Anna Karlin's faculty web page at U. Washington], retrieved 2011-01-16.

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