William Kolakoski

William George Kolakoski (September 17, 1944 – July 26, 1997), known as Bill to family and friends, was an American artist and recreational mathematician who is most famous for devising and giving his name to the Kolakoski sequence, a self-generating sequence of integers that has been extensively studied by mathematicians since he first described it in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1965.

He graduated from CIT with honors as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting in 1967 and worked for a time at United States Steel as a draftsman. However, because he had schizophrenia and had to take constant medication to avoid psychosis and delusions, he was unable to keep in steady employment or to develop his artistic career as he wanted. He eventually moved to West Virginia, where he met his wife Loretta and found a position as an artist-in-residence in Fairmont. In 1996, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and he died July 26, 1997, at the Fairmont General Hospital.