Malvin Avram Ruderman (March 25, 1927 – July 20, 2024) was an American physicist and astrophysicist.
[1] His MS degree (1947) and PhD (1951) are from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Robert Jay Finkelstein.
[2] With Charles Kittel in 1954, Ruderman discovered the RKKY interaction for nuclear magnetic moments in certain metals (independently developed by Kasuya and Yosida, hence its name).
With Charles Kittel and Walter D. Knight, he was co-author of the final published volume.
[4] In 1969, Ruderman and (independently) Gordon Baym, Christopher Pethick, and David Pines, were the first to propose that discontinuous slowings observed in neutron stars, so called starquakes, were due to the cracking of the star's solid crust, under increasing stress due to the gradual slowdown of the pulsar.