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David A. Klarner

David Anthony Klarner (October 10, 1940 – March 20, 1999) was an American mathematician, author, and educator. He is known for his work in combinatorial enumeration, polyominoes,^[3] and box-packing.^[4][5][6]

Klarner was a friend and correspondent of mathematics popularizer Martin Gardner and frequently made contributions to Gardner's Mathematical Games columninScientific American.^[7] He edited a book honoring Gardner on the occasion of his 65th birthday.^[8][9] Gardner in turn dedicated his twelfth collection of mathematical games columns to Klarner.^[10]

Beginning in 1969 Klarner made significant contributions to the theory of combinatorial enumeration, especially focusing on polyominoes^[11] and box-packing.^[12][5] Working with Ronald L. Rivest he found upper bounds on the number of n-ominoes.^[4] Klarner's Theorem is the statement that an mbyn rectangle can be packed with 1-by-x rectangles if and only if x divides one of m and n.^[1][13]

He has also published important results in group theory^[14] and number theory, in particular working on the Collatz conjecture (sometimes called the 3x + 1 problem).^[15] The Klarner-Rado Sequence is named after Klarner and Richard Rado.^[2]

Biography[edit]

Klarner was born in Fort Bragg, California, and spent his childhood in Napa, California.^[7] He married Kara Lynn Klarner in 1961. Their son Carl Eoin Klarner was born on April 21, 1969.^[16]

Klarner did his undergraduate work at Humboldt State University (1960–63), got his Ph.D. at the University of Alberta (1963–66), and did post-doctoral work at McMaster UniversityinHamilton, Ontario (1966–68). He also did post-doctoral work at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands (1968-1970), at the University of Reading in England working with Richard Rado (1970–71),^[17] and at Stanford University (1971–73). He served as an assistant professor at Binghamton University (1973–79) and was a visiting professor at Humboldt State University in California (1979–80). He returned to Eindhoven as a professor (1980–81), and to Binghamton (1981–82). From 1982 to 1996 he was a professor of computer science at the University of Nebraska, at Lincoln, with a one-year break at Eindhoven in academic year 1991–92. He retired to Eureka, California in 1997 and died there in 1999.^[7]

He was a frequent contributor to recreational mathematics and worked with many key mathematics popularizers including Ronald L. Rivest, John H. Conway, Richard K. Guy, Donald Coxeter, Ronald Graham, and Donald Knuth.^{[18][8][19][11]}

Organizations and awards[edit]

Klarner was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Fibonacci Association.^[7] He was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship Award in mathematics in 1963.^[20] In 1986 Klarner received a University of Nebraska-Lincoln Distinguished Teaching Award in Computer Science.^[21]

The David A. Klarner Fellowship for Computer Science was set up after Klarner's death by Spyros Magliveras a fellow professor in Computer Science at UNL.^[22]

Bibliography[edit]

• Asymptotically Optimal Box Packing Theorems: Klarner systems by Michael Reid, Department of Mathematics, University of Central Florida, June, 2008
• A Lifetime of Puzzles edited by Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Tom Rodgers; pp. 221–225: Satterfield's Tomb, a puzzle by David A. Klarner and Wade Satterfield; ISBN 1568812450

Selected publications[edit]

Books[edit]

• The Mathematical Gardner (editor), Publisher: Boston : Prindle, Weber & Schmidt; Belmont, Calif. : Wadsworth International, ISBN 0486400891, ISBN 9781468466867 (electronic book)^[9]

Papers[edit]

• Polyominoes by Gill Barequet, Solomon W. Golomb, and David A. Klarner, December 2016^[23]
• The number of tilings of a block with blocks (with F. S. S. Magliveras), European Journal of Combinatorics: Volume 9 Issue 4, July 1988
• The number of tiered posets modulo six^{[permanent dead link]} Discrete Mathematics, Vol. 62, Issue 3, pp. 295–297, December 1986
• Asymptotics for coefficients of algebraic functions (with Patricia Woodworth), Aequationes Mathematicae, Volume 23, Issue 1, pp. 236–241, December 1981
• An algorithm to determine when certain sets have 0-density Journal of Algorithms, Vol. 2, Issue 1, Pages 31–43, March 1981
• Some remarks on the Cayley-Hamilton theorem American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 83, No. 5, pp. 367–369, May, 1976
• Asymptotic bounds for the number of convex n-ominoes^{[permanent dead link]} (with Ronald L. Rivest), Discrete Mathematics, Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp. 31–40, March 1974
• A finite basis theorem revisited^{[permanent dead link]} Stanford University: Computer Science Department, April 1973
• The number of SDR's in certain regular systems Stanford University: Computer Science Department, April 1973
• Selected combinatorial research problems (with Václav Chvátal and Donald E. Knuth), Stanford University: Computer Science Department, June 1972
• Sets generated by iteration of a linear operation Stanford University: Computer Science Department, March 1972
• Linear Combinations of Sets of Consecutive Integers (with Richard Rado), Stanford University: Computer Science Department, March 1972
• Sets generated by iteration of a linear operation Stanford University: Computer Science Department, March 1972
• Packing a rectangle with congruent n-ominoes Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Vol. 7, Issue 2, Pages 107–115, September 1969
• Packing boxes with congruent figures (with F. Göbel), Indagationes Mathematicae 31, pp. 465–472, MR 40 #6362, 1969
• Some Results Concerning Polyominoes Fibonacci Quarterly, 3, pp. 9–20, February 1965

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• David A. Klarner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• David A. Klarner fonds University of Calgary Special Collections