Jack Kenneth Hale (3 October 1928 – 9 December 2009) was an American mathematician working primarily in the field of dynamical systems and functional differential equations.

[4] Jack Hale defended his Ph.D. thesis "On the Asymptotic Behavior of the Solutions of Systems of Differential Equations" at Purdue University under Lamberto Cesari in 1954;[3] his undergraduate years were spent at Berea College, where he was studying Mathematics until 1949.

[5] In 1954–57, Hale worked as a Systems Analyst at Sandia Corporation and in 1957–58 he was a staff scientist at Remington Rand Univac.

The following year he shared the 1965 Chauvenet Prize with LaSalle for their exposition in the piece on Differential Equations: Linearity vs. Nonlinearity published in the SIAM Review.

[5] The biennial Jack K. Hale Award was established in 2013 by Elsevier with the aim of distinguishing researchers who have made outstanding contributions in the fields of dynamics and differential equations.