Carl R. de Boor

Carl- Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor ( born December 3, 1937 in Stolp, today Poland ) is a German - American mathematician and professor emeritus of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. His research interests are numerical analysis and approximation theory, in particular splines.

Life

De Boor studied from 1956 to 1959 at the University of Hamburg, 1959/60 at Harvard University (as an assistant to Garrett Birkhoff ) and from 1964 at the University of Michigan, where he received his doctorate in Christian Robert F. Bartels, 1966 ( The Method of Projections as Applied to the Numerical Solution of Two Point Boundary Value problem Using Cubic splines ). 1960-1964 he worked as a student at General Motors. His first publications to Splines are from 1962. 1966 he became Assistant Professor in 1968 and Associate Professor at Purdue University and from 1972 he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

1970 to 1995 he was a visiting scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and 1970/71 Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.

He is a U.S. citizen. De Boor is married and has four children.

Awards

In 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1993 the National Academy of Engineering, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2003 he received the National Medal of Science in Mathematics. He won the 1996 John von Neumann Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the John Gregory Award of Geometric Design in 2009. Since 1998 he is a member of the Leopoldina and he is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1992 he received the Humboldt Research Award. He holds honorary doctorates from the Technion and Purdue University and a Fellow of SIAM.

In 1985 he was Fairchild Scholar at Caltech. He was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1978 in Helsinki ( polynomial interpolation).

Writings

• A practical Guide to Splines, Springer, revised edition, 2001 ISBN 978-0387953663
• On calculating with B- splines, J. Approximation Theory, Volume 6, 1972, pp. 50-62.