Biography
Yudell Luke was born in Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. on 26 June 1918 to Jewish parents. His father, David Luke, was the sexton in a synagogue. The young Luke attended the Kansas City Missouri Junior College, graduating in 1937. He read mathematics at the University of Illinois, receiving a Bachelors in 1939, and a Masters 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; he 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 then moved to Kansas City in 1946. They later 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.
Soon after Luke moved to Kansas City, he was appointed to the Midwest Research Institute. His first position was as Head of the Mathematical Analysis Section, a position he held until his promotion to Senior Advisor for Mathematics in 1961. Luke also held posts at other universities. In 1955, he became a lecturer at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and he also taught at the University of Kansas. After the mathematics group of the Midwest Research Institute was disbanded in 1971, Luke was appointed as professor at the University of Missouri, and in 1975, received the N T Veatch award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity. He then became Curator's Professor at Missouri in 1978.
In 1982, an exchange programme between the University of Missouri and the University of Moscow was formed, and the following year, Luke travelled to Moscow to lecture on a series of topics as part of the programme, including special functions, asymptotic analysis and approximation theory. However, he died while in Moscow, Russia on 6 May 1983.
Luke had a wide range of interests outside mathematics, including basketball, baseball, and playing the card games bridge and cribbage. He wrote two books on the probabilities of winning at the latter. 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's ideas.
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