Saul Kaplun

Saul Kaplun (July 3, 1924 Lwów, Poland now Lviv, Ukraine – February 13, 1964, of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Morris J. Kaplun (February 12, 1888 Kamenetz-Podolsk, Ukraine – ?), a textile businessman and industrialist and a prominent Zionist philanthropist beginning in the 1930s, and Betty (Bettina) Kaplun Morris Kaplun himself "learned for the first time just how important a man [his son] was in his field. The late Dr. Saul Kaplun… left behind 'a roomful of manuscripts' which Prof. Paco Lagerstrom, of the California Institute of Technology, who spoke at the dedication, said contained 'a wealth of scientific ideas far outweighing his published work'."

Career Saul Kaplun received his PhD in 1954 under the advisorship of Paco Lagerstrom at the California Institute of Technology with his thesis dissertation The role of coordinate systems in boundary layer theory. Kaplun and Lagerstrom later collaborated on and published an article together and Lagerstrom edited Kaplun's papers for publication as a monograph after the latter's death.

Kaplun spent his entire academic career, a total of 20 years, at Caltech and received four degrees there.

Sunil Datta wrote, "Singular perturbation method… It was left to the genius of Saul Kaplun (1957) to recognize the analogy between the theory of flow at small Reynolds number and boundary layer theory and to apply to it the singular perturbation method."

Articles

Theses EngD thesis

PhD Thesis

Legacy

Morris Kaplun's philanthropy included funding of the Saul Kaplun Institute of Applied Mathematics and Space Physics at Tel Aviv University, Israel, consecrated in February 1966, which was attended by Prof. Paco Lagerstrom and others; and of the Saul Kaplun Building for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dedicated a month later in the presence of the university president, Eliahu Eilat.

Morris Kaplun also established a memorial fellowship which funds graduate research in applied mathematics and is awarded in perpetuity in his son's name at Caltech.

The father wrote a short book about his son: My Son Saul: Saul Kaplun, July 3, 1924 – February 13, 1964, in Memoriam, published in 1965.