36 Reducibility among Combinatorial Problems (1972)

Richard "Dick" Karp (b. 1935) was born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. His father was a school teacher who rose to be a school principal. Karp liked puzzles and games, and received an early practical lesson in combinatorial explosion helping his father arrange the school's class calendar by shuffling cards in search of a schedule that satisfied various constraints about use of classrooms, availability of teachers, and so on.