Edward Lynn Kaplan (May 11, 1920 – September 26, 2006)[1] was a mathematician most famous for the Kaplan–Meier estimator,[2] developed together with Paul Meier.
He was offered Westinghouse's Putnam Prize Scholar Scholarship in mathematics at Harvard but was unable to accept due to his involvement in war efforts.
From June 1941 to August 1948, Kaplan worked at the United States Naval Ordinance Laboratory, Whiteoak, Maryland.
Kaplan finished his PhD dissertation, "Infinite permutations of stationary random sequences" in November, 1950.
In 1957, he went to the Computation Division of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Livermore, CA, where he worked on the Monte Carlo simulations attendant to the development of the hydrogen bomb.