Person: Luke, Yudell Leo
Yudell Luke was an American mathematician who worked in many areas including aeronautics and approximation theory.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- From 1942 until 1946 Luke served in the U.S. navy, being stationed in Hawaii.
- Luke was appointed to the Midwest Research Institute soon after he returned to Kansas City in 1946.
- in addition to his own research activities and the supervision of the research members of the Applied Mathematics Group, Professor Luke had a variety of responsibilities including that of procuring research projects for the Institute from government and industrial organisations.
- In 1955 Luke had been appointed a lecturer at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.
- He also taught at the University of Kansas and, after the mathematics group at the Midwest Research Institute was disbanded in 1971, Luke was appointed as professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.
- Luke published nearly 100 papers and eight books during his highly distinguished career.
- In order to compute tables of special functions, Luke needed to acquire expertise in approximation theory and in this way he was led to the main area of research on which he was to become a leading world expert.
- Luke used this method at a time when most of the interest in numerical analysis was still centred around finite difference techniques.
- Not only did he use rational approximation, but Luke also developed series expansions as an approximation method.
- Many of these methods involved great computational problems and Luke was led to another important area of his research, namely the design of algorithms to implement his numerical approximations.
- It was not only through his research, however, that Luke contributed to mathematics.
- In 1983 Luke travelled to Moscow to lecture there as part of this exchange programme.
- Luke wrote two books on the probabilities of winning at the card game of cribbage.
Born 26 June 1918, Kansas City, Missouri, USA. Died 6 May 1983, Moscow, Russia.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
