Gabriel Kron

Gabriel Kron
Born	(1901-12-00)December 0, 1901 Baia Mare, Romania (Nagybanya, Austria-Hungary)
Died	Schenectady, New York, USA
Occupation(s)	Engineer, mathematician and former member of the General Engineering Staff at General Electric

Gabriel Kron (1901 – 1968) was considered an unconventional and somewhat controversial engineer who worked for General Electric in the US from 1934 until 1966. He was responsible for the first load flow (electricity) distribution system in New York. Kron is famous for his Method of Tearing or Diakoptics.

Instead of taking a conventional postgraduate degree, Kron went on a two year walking tour around the world.

Biography

Kron came to the USA in 1921. He studied for a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. He received citizenship papers in 1926. Then he went on a two-year trip on foot around the world. He published several books and more than fifty papers. He won the Montefiore Prize of the University of Liège, Belgium, for his paper entitled "Non-Riemannian Dynamics of Rotating Electrical Machinery". He worked for General Electric until 1966.

Contributions

Kron has made contributions to the following fields:

• Non-Euclidian geometry
• Tensor analysis
• Electrical engineering
• Computational circuit analysis
• Forecasting and optimizing
• Network topology
• Energy conversion
• System engineering

Method of Tearing

The "Method of Tearing" is a technique for splitting up physical problems into sub-problems, solving each individual sub-problem, and then recombining them to give an exact overall solution. The technique is efficient on sequential computers, but is particularly so on parallel architectures. Its relevance to quantum parallelism is not yet understood. It is peculiar as a decomposition method, in that it involves taking values on the "intersection layer" (the boundary between subsystems) into account. The method has been rediscovered by the parallel processing community recently under the name "Domain Decomposition". It is also related to Mereology, the Science of Parts and Wholes.

The Tensor Club of Great Britain (TCGB) and the Research Association of Applied Geometry of Tokyo (RAAG) were formed to study Kron's and similar work. Diakoptics has also found use in many other branches of engineering, including structures, aerodynamics, control systems, and nuclear reactors.

Awards and honors

Kron has received the following awards and honors:

• Doctor of Science honoris causa, University of Nottingham, 1961
• Montefiore Prize, University of the Liège, Belgium, 1935
• Coffin Award, General Electric Company, 1942
• Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, Honorary, University of Michigan, 1936
• Patron and Honorary Member of the Tensor Club of Great Britain
• Honorary Member, Research Association of Applied Geometry, Tokyo

Bibliography

Articles

1945, Electric Circuit Models of the Schrödinger Equation, Physical Review, (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRev.67.39)

1945, Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations by Means of Equivalent Circuits, Journal of Applied Physics, doi:10.1063/1.1707568

Further reading

• Alger, P., (ed), 1969, The Life and Times of Gabriel Kron. Mohawk Development Publ., Schenectady, NY. LCCN 70-99590.
• Bowden, K., 1998, Huygens Principle, Physics and Computers. Int. J. General Systems, Vol 27(1-3), pp 9–32.
• Kron, G., 1963, Diakoptics: The Piecewise Solution of Large Scale Systems, MacDonald.
• Kron, G., 1959, Tensors for Circuits. Dover Publ., New York.
• Hoffmann, B., 1949, "Kron's Non-Riemannian Electrodynamics". Reviews of Modern Physics; Vol. 21, Numb. 3.