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

Gabriel Kron was born in 1901 in Baia Mare in Transylvania, Hungary. In 1919 he graduated from the Gymnasium (continental European Latin high school). By that time Transylvania had been ceded to Romania. Kron's older brother Joseph returned home, which he had left when he was ten years old. Joseph wished for a professional degree, but had no schooling after grade five. Gabriel tutored Joseph, who passed various exams, culminating in the high-school exam in 1920. In December of that year the two left home for the United States. The brothers earned their living in New York city with odd jobs such as dish washer, bus boy, or working machines in garment factories..

In the fall of 1922 the brothers had saved enough money to enter engineering school in the University of Michigan. They continued supporting themselves with casual employment. Gabriel found digging ditches more congenial than dishwashing. He coined the motto: "There are only two occupations compatible with human dignity. One is the study of atomic structure. The other is digging ditches."

In 1925 Gabriel graduated and started on a trip around the world. He planned to walk and hitch hike as much as possible. He ran out of money when he reached Los Angeles, where he worked for the United States Electrical Manufacturing Company. He then transferred to the Robbins and Myers Company in Springfield, Ohio. In 1926 he set out again. From California he took passage on an oil tanker bound for Tahiti. In Sydney, Australia he ran out of money. After saving 35 pounds from work at the "Electricity Metering Manufacturing Company" he set out for Northern Australia.

In Fiji he had finished, and buried, "Differential Equations" by Forsythe. In Sydney he looked for a worthy successor, but was disappointed to find only one book of satisfactory content, "Vector Analysis" by Weatherburn. During long hikes in Queensland, Korn envisioned a high-dimensional vector analysis that would be a powerful tool in engineering.

Sea voyages took him to Borneo, Manila, Hongkong, and Saigon. Hence overland to Cairo and Alexandria by rail supplemented by many hours of walking. In the spring of 1928 Kron arrived in Romania and stayed with his family till the fall.

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.