Edward Kasner

Edward Kasner, who lived from 2 April 1878 to 7 January 1955, was an American mathematician who spent his career at Columbia University and specialized in differential geometry. Born in New York City, he studied at the City College of New York and took his doctorate at Columbia in 1899, one of the first mathematics doctorates that university awarded, then spent a year at Gottingen hearing Felix Klein and David Hilbert. He became a full professor in 1910 and chaired the department from 1937, the first Jewish person appointed to a science faculty position at Columbia. He is best remembered for introducing the word googol for ten to the power one hundred, a name suggested by his nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta, and he popularized it in the 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination, written with James R. Newman. The Kasner metric and the Kasner polygon also carry his name.