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Kenneth Appel
Summary
Kenneth Ira Appel (October 8, 1932 – April 19, 2013) was an American mathematician who in 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color.
Appel was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 8, 1932. He grew up in Queens, New York, and was the son of a Jewish couple, Irwin Appel and Lillian Sender Appel. He worked as an actuary for a brief time and then served in the U.S. Army for two years at Fort Benning, Georgia, and in Baumholder, Germany. In 1959, he finished his doctoral program at the University of Michigan, and he also married Carole S. Stein in Philadelphia. The couple moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Appel worked for the Institute for Defense Analyses from 1959 to 1961. His main work at the Institute for Defense Analyses was doing research in cryptography. Toward the end of his life, in 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He died in Dover, New Hampshire, on April 19, 2013, after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer in October 2012.
Kenneth Appel was also the treasurer of the Strafford County Democratic Committee. He played tennis through his early 50s. He was a lifelong stamp collector, a player of the game of Go and a baker of bread. He and Carole had two sons, Andrew W. Appel, a noted computer scientist, and Peter H. Appel, and a daughter, Laurel F. Appel, who died on March 4, 2013. He was also a member of the Dover school board from 2010 until his death.
Kenneth Appel received his bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1953. After serving the army he attended the University of Michigan where he earned his M.A. in 1956, and then later his Ph.D. in 1959. Roger Lyndon, his doctoral advisor, was a mathematician whose main mathematical focus was in group theory.
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