Yudell Luke

Yudell Leo Luke (26 June 1918 – 6 May 1983) was an American mathematician who made significant contributions to MRIGlobal, was awarded the N. T. Veatch award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity in 1975, and appointed as Curator's Professor at the University of Missouri in 1978, a post he held until his death.

Luke published eight books and nearly 100 papers in a wide variety of mathematical areas, ranging from aeronautics to approximation theory. By his own estimation, Luke reviewed over 1,800 papers and books throughout his career.

Biography Yudell Luke was born in Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. on 26 June 1918 to Jewish parents. His father, David Luke, was sexton of Congregation Kerem Israel Beth Shalom. The young Luke attended the Kansas City Missouri Junior College, graduating in 1937. He read mathematics at the University of Illinois, receiving a Bachelor's degree in 1939, and a Master's the following year. He then taught at the university for two years, but was called up for World War II military service in 1942.

Luke served in the United States Navy until 1946 and was stationed in Hawaii for the duration of the war. After his service, he returned to the university, where he met his future wife LaVerne (LaVerne B. (née Podolsky), 1922–2004) at the University of Illinois. They moved to Kansas City in 1946 and had four daughters, Molly, Janis, Linda, and Debra, and established the Yudell and LaVerne Luke Senior Adult Transportation Fund at the Kansas City Jewish Community Center. He also expressed interest in opera and philosophy, and once gave a series of lectures on the history of philosophy, mainly focusing on Baruch Spinoza.

Selected bibliography Papers "Rational approximations to the exponential function". Journal of the ACM, 4(1):24–29, January 1957.

Books "Integrals of Bessel functions". MacGraw-Hill. 1962 "The Special Functions and Their Approximations: v. 1 (Mathematics in Science & Engineering)". Academic Press Inc. April 1969. "The Special Functions and Their Approximations: v. 2 (Mathematics in Science & Engineering)". Academic Press Inc. 1969. "Cumulative Index to Mathematics of Computation 1943–1969". American Mathematical Society. December 1972. "Algorithms for the Computation of Mathematical Functions". Academic Press Inc. 1977.