Charles Hallam Brenner is an American mathematician who is the originator of forensic mathematics. His father

Joel Lee Brenner Joel Lee Brenner ( – ) was an American mathematician who specialized in matrix theory, linear algebra, and group theory. He is known as the translator of several popular Russian texts. He was a teaching professor at some dozen colleges and univ ...

was a professor of mathematics and his mother Frances Hallam Brenner was a city councilor and briefly mayor of

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish language, Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree kno ...

. His uncle Charles Brenner, MD was a psychiatrist. Brenner received a

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

from Stanford University in 1967, and a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

from the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

(UCLA) in 1984. Brenner participated in the implementation of

APL\360 APL (named after the book ''A Programming Language'') is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent mo ...

and APL\1130, and implemented the transpose and rotate primitive functions. More recently, Brenner specializes in the use of mathematics in DNA analysis. His principal areas of interest and achievement in the mathematics of forensic DNA are kinship, rare

haplotype A haplotype ( haploid genotype) is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent. Many organisms contain genetic material ( DNA) which is inherited from two parents. Normally these organisms have their DNA or ...

matching, and DNA mixtures. In a couple of Y haplotype papers, most recently, he showed why Y haplotypes must be much rarer, and how much rarer, than their sample frequency in a reference population sample. Brenner’s Symbolic Kinship Program, which can for example assess the identification evidence based on DNA profiles from an anonymous body and an arbitrary set of presumed relatives, has been widely used in mass victim identification projects, including identifying about 1/3 of the identified

World Trade Center World Trade Centers are sites recognized by the World Trade Centers Association. World Trade Center may refer to: Buildings * List of World Trade Centers * World Trade Center (2001–present), a building complex that includes five skyscrapers, a ...

bodies. Brenner played a key role in the resolution of the Larry Hillblom inheritance case, resulting in four Amerasian children each receiving $50 million.

Anecdotes

* Between 1968 and 1973, Brenner lived in London, U.K. and supported himself by playing

contract bridge Contract bridge, or simply bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard 52-card deck. In its basic format, it is played by four players in two competing partnerships, with partners sitting opposite each other around a table. Millions o ...

professionally. * Brenner asked Gordon, his advisor, “How far can you get in mathematics without being smart?”
“Quite far,” he said.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brenner, Charles 1945 births Living people American contract bridge players APL implementers American bioinformaticians IBM employees Number theorists Palo Alto High School alumni People from Palo Alto, California People from Princeton, New Jersey Stanford University alumni University of California, Berkeley people University of California, Los Angeles alumni