Edward L. Kaplan

Edward Lynn Kaplan (1920 to 2006) was a mathematician most famous for the Kaplan-Meier estimator, which he developed together with Paul Meier. Born in Philadelphia, he took a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1941 and was one of the five honorees of the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in each of 1939, 1940 and 1941. He worked at the United States Naval Ordnance Laboratory, then completed a Princeton doctorate in November 1950 with a dissertation on infinite permutations of stationary random sequences. After years at Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore he joined the mathematics department of Oregon State University in 1961 and remained there for the rest of his career.