Joseph Kruskal - Definition

Joseph Bernard Kruskal (b. 1929 in New York) is an American mathematician, statistician, and psychometrician. He was a student at the University of Chicago and at Princeton University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1954, nominally under Albert Tucker and Roger Lyndon, but de facto under Paul Erdős with whom he had two very short conversations. Kruskal has worked on well-quasi-orderings and multidimensional scaling. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, former president of the Psychometric Society, and former president of the Classification Society of North America. He also initiated and was first president of the Fair Housing Council of South Orange and Maplewood in 1963, and actively supported civil rights in several other organizations.

He should not be confused with his two brothers Martin David Kruskal (born 1925; co-inventor of solitons and of surreal numbers) and William Kruskal (born 1919; developed the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance).