Isaac Jacob Schoenberg

Isaac " Iso " Jacob Schoenberg (* April 21, 1903, Galaţi, Romania, † 21 February 1990) was a Romanian- American mathematician, known for the discovery of splines.

He was the son of a doctor and studied mathematics at the University of Jassy and after graduation in 1922 in Berlin (with Isay Schur ) and Göttingen. In 1926 he received his doctorate in Jassy with a thesis on analytic number theory, stimulated by shearing. With the assistance of Edmund Landau, he was in 1928 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1930 he married the Landau 's daughter Charlotte. In 1930 he went with a Rockefeller Fellowship in the United States, was at Gilbert Ames Bliss at the University of Chicago, was at Harvard University, from 1933 to 1935 at the Institute for Advanced Study, taught at Swarthmore College and Colby and from 1941 at the University of Pennsylvania. 1943 to 1945 he was involved in important war research at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the ballistic Research Center of the U.S. Army. Here he began to deal with splines and published about 1946. 1966 until his retirement in 1973 he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Even after his retirement, he remained scientifically active.

Besides splines and their applications in approximation theory and the solution of differential equations he also dealt among other things with polynomials with real zeros and embedding of metric spaces into Hilbert spaces.

His sister was married to Hans Rademacher.