David A. Klarner


David Anthony Klarner was an American mathematician, author, and educator. He is known for his work in combinatorial enumeration, polyominoes, and box-packing.
Klarner was a friend and correspondent of mathematics popularizer Martin Gardner and frequently made contributions to Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. He edited a book honoring Gardner on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Gardner in turn dedicated his twelfth collection of mathematical games columns to Klarner.
Beginning in 1969 Klarner made significant contributions to the theory of combinatorial enumeration, especially focusing on polyominoes and box-packing. Working with Ronald L. Rivest he found upper bounds on the number of n-ominoes. Klarner's Theorem is the statement that an m by n rectangle can be packed with 1-by-x rectangles if and only if x divides one of m and n.
He has also published important results in group theory and number theory, in particular working on the Collatz conjecture. The Klarner-Rado Sequence is named after Klarner and Richard Rado.

Biography

Klarner was born in Fort Bragg, California, and spent his childhood in Napa, California. He married Kara Lynn Klarner in 1961. Their son Carl Eoin Klarner was born on April 21, 1969.
Klarner did his undergraduate work at Humboldt State University, got his Ph.D. at the University of Alberta, and did post-doctoral work at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He also did post-doctoral work at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, at the University of Reading in England working with Richard Rado, and at Stanford University. He served as an assistant professor at Binghamton University and was a visiting professor at Humboldt State University in California. He returned to Eindhoven as a professor, and to Binghamton. 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.
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.

Organizations and awards

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

Selected publications

Books