Joseph Bernard Kruskal, Jr. (/ˈkrʌskəl/; January 29, 1928 – September 19, 2010) was an American mathematician, statistician, computer scientist and psychometrician.
He also initiated and was first president of the Fair Housing Council of South Orange and Maplewood in 1963, and actively supported civil rights in several other organizations such as CORE.
[9] In statistics, Kruskal's most influential work is his seminal contribution to the formulation of multidimensional scaling.
Minimal spanning trees have applications to the construction and pricing of communication networks.
In combinatorics, he is known for Kruskal's tree theorem (1960), which is also interesting from a mathematical logic perspective since it can only be proved nonconstructively.