Kleitman and combinatorics: A celebration (Q1850008)

The mysterious ``author'' G. W. Peck is not a mathematician, but a combination of the bold capitals of \textit{R. I. Graham}, \textit{Dong B. West}, \textit{G. Purdue}, \textit{Paul Erdős}, \textit{F. R. K. Chung}, and \textit{Daniel J. Kleitman}. (Gregory Peck being a famous movie star.) This ``G. W. Peck'' published 14 papers on discrete mathematics from 1980 to 1992, plus about 30 signed reviews in Mathematical Reviews. The present paper gives a biography of Daniel J. Kleitman, born October 4, 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Morristown High School in 1950, attended Cornell University and graduated in 1954. He majored in physics, but enjoyed mathematics much more. Paul Erdős convinced him to change to mathematics. He was also influenced by Marc Kac and Pierre Samuel (Paris) who visited Cornell and introduced him to Bourbaki's ideas. Kleitman was very successful specially in combinatorics. More than 200 papers, more than 130 as co-author appeared, and he was the looking supervisor of 30 Ph.D. students (see the 1980 survey by Michael Saks). Most known are the Prison Yard Problem, the Helly Theorem, the Six Lonely Runners Problem, and extremal graph theory, the Matrix Aborescence Theory, trees, card shuffling, computer science, computational biology, use of computers in mathematical education. In 1998 appeared his paper: My career in the Movies. A meeting in honour of his 65th-birthday was held at M.I.T., from August 16-18, 1999 to celebrate his work and share stories and anecdotes of his exploits, with two poems dedicated to him. Appendices: A) 15 publications of ``G. W. Peck'', B) a list of 132 academic descendants of D. J. Kleitman, C) 132 co-authors of D. J. Kleitman, 45 references.