Joseph B. Keller (born July 31, 1923, Paterson, New Jersey) is an American mathematician who specializes in applied mathematics. He is best known for his work on the "Geometrical Theory of Diffraction" (GTD). [1]

He obtained his PhD in 1948 from New York University under the supervision of Richard Courant. He was a Professor of Mathematics in the Courant Institute at New York University until 1979. Then he was Professor of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University until 1993, when he became Professor Emeritus.

He has a brother who was also a mathematician, Herbert B. Keller, at Caltech who has studied numerical analysis, scientific computing, bifurcation theory, path following and homotopy methods, computational fluid dynamics. Both have contributed to the fields of electromagnetics and fluid dynamics.

He worked on the application of mathematics to problems in science and engineering, such as wave propagation. He contributed to the Einstein-Brillouin-Keller method for computing eigenvalues in quantum mechanical systems.

In 1988 he was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science, and in 1997 he was awarded the Wolf Prize, by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation. In 1996, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics.

External links

* Official biography
* Curriculum vitae
* Joseph Keller at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
* "Interview with Joseph Keller" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society 51 (7): pp.751–760. August 2004. http://www.ams.org/notices/200407/fea-keller.pdf. Retrieved 2008-01-17.

References

1. ^ J. B. Keller, "Geometrical theory of diffraction", J. Opt. Soc. Am., vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 116-130, 1962.