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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. - Wikipedia

"Gabriel Kron was born in 1901 in Nagybanya (Baia Mare)in the Carpathian Mountains in Hungary. He and his brother reached New York in 1921 as immigrants. Both brothers entered Michigan Universitiy the same year after learning English the fast way. Gabriel Kron later took a job with the Lincoln Electric Company in Cleveland and presented his first paper in 1930. 1931 with Warner Brothers. In 1934 he joined General Electric and worked there in various departments, all concerened with applied engineering. Doctor of Engineering - 1936 : note of Univ. Michigan. His books and 100 papers were written on weekends and at night. Gabriel Kron retired in 1966, died from a fatal illness in 1968." - Early Ideas in the History of Quantum Chemistry

Books:

• The Application of Tensors to the Analysis of Rotating Electrical Machinery, Parts I - XVL, General Electric Review (1938/1942) 208 pp.
• Tensor Analysis of Networks, Wiley, Chapman & Hall (1939), 635 pp.
• A Short Course in Tensor Analysis for Electrical Engineers, Wiley; Chapman & Hall (1942), 250 pp.
  Republished as Tensors for Circuits with a new Introduction and List of Publications, Dover (1959).
• Equivalent Circuits of Electric Machinery, Wiley (1951). With a new Preface: Dover (1967), 278 pp.
• Diakoptics: The Piecewise Solution of Large Scale Systems, MacDonald (1963), 166 pp.

Websites:

• Early Ideas in the History of Quantum Chemistry - Phillip Alger
• Gabriel Kron and the Negative Resistor - Tom Bearden
• Directory: Gabriel Kron - PESWiki
• Gabriel Kron - Phil Cullen