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Jeffrey Owen Katz, Ph.D., is an American scientist best known for his pivotal contribution to the field of factor analysis and his development of advanced AI (artificial intelligence) software. Born April 6, 1950, he is the only child of Nathan Katz (accountant) and Rosalyn Anker (talent agent, entertainer, lapidary shop owner, and founder of Anima... ls in Distress). He grew up in Queens, New York, but moved with his family to Merrick, N.Y. in 1962. He was a recognized child prodigy in electronic engineering, able to read and draw schematic diagrams before he could read and write English. Rather than send their only child away to a boarding school for gifted children, his parents arranged for home-schooling, which was continued until Katz' mid-teens when he began auditing college level courses at local universities. Eventually Katz enrolled in undergraduate studies at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York. Katz rapidly advanced through mathematics, psychology, psychophysiology, physics, and biology. As a graduate student in mathematics at SUNY Stony Brook, he published a new method of factor rotation (Functionplane: A new approach to simple structure rotation. Psychometrika, March 1974, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 37-51), programmed (in Fortran) a portion of the Numerical Taxonomy Systems Package, and published a number of other papers in refereed journals. In the mid-1970s, Katz was invited to enroll at the University of Lancaster in England, where his academic interests and expertise coalesced in the application of mathematics and psychometrics to the study of psychophysiology and genetics via sophisticated instrumentation which he designed and built. Katz's graduate studies were interrupted by an extended critical illness during which time he returned to his family home in the U.S. In 1983, Katz received a Ph.D. from the University of Lancaster, England, under the mentorship of both Phillip Levy, Chair of Lancaster's Psychology Department, and Hans Eysenck, world-renowned psychometrician ...Read More