Gabriel Kron

Gabriel Kron (born Hungary, 1901) was an unconventional and somewhat controversial Engineer who worked for GE in the US from 1934 until his death in 1968. He was responsible for the first load flow (electricity) distribution system in New York.

Instead of taking a conventional postgraduate degree Kron went on a two year walking tour around the world. This is documented in Alger's book referenced below.

He was perhaps most famous for his Method of Tearing or Diakoptics, a technique for splitting up physical problems into subproblems, solving each individual subproblem and then recombining to give an (unexpectedly) 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".

The Tensor Society of Great Britain (TSGB) and the Japanese Research Association for Applied Geometry (RAAG) were formed to study Kron's and similar work.

References

* Alger P L, "The Life and Times of Gabriel Kron", Mohawk 1969.
* Kron G, "Diakoptics: The Piecewise Solution of Large Scale Systems", MacDonald, 1963.
* Kron G, "Tensor Analysis of Networks", Chapman & Hall, London, 1939.
* Lai C H, "Diakoptics, Domain Decomposition and Parallel Computing", The Computer Journal, Volume 37, Issue 10, pp. 840-846