Joseph B. Kruskal Jr. *54

Joseph Kruskal, an eminent statistician who was a retired member of the technical staff of Bell Labs, died Sept. 19, 2010. He was 82.

Kruskal received two degrees from Chicago, and in 1954 earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton. After two years of research at Princeton, he was an instructor at Wisconsin and an assistant professor at Michigan. He joined Bell Labs in 1959 and retired in 1993. From 1967 to 1968, he was a visiting professor at Yale.

Known for Kruskal’s Algorithm in computer science and the Kruskal Tree Algorithm, he was a fellow of the American Statistical Association and a former president of both the Psychometric Society and the Classifi-
cation Society of North America.

Kruskal was predeceased by two well-known older brothers. The eldest, William, was a distinguished professor at Chicago, best known for the Kruskal-Wallis test, a part of every major statistical computer system. His other brother, Martin, was at Princeton from 1951 to 1989, and retired as professor emeritus of mathematics and astrophysical sciences. In 1968, he founded Princeton’s Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.

Joseph Kruskal is survived by his wife, Rachel, and two children.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.