Isaac Jacob Schoenberg | |
|---|---|
 I. J. Schoenberg in 1971 | |
| Born | (1903-04-21)April 21, 1903 Galați, Romania |
| Died | February 21, 1990(1990-02-21) (aged 86) Madison, Wisconsin, USA |
| Education | University of Iași |
| Known for | Splines |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Swarthmore College Colby College University of Pennsylvania University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| Doctoral advisor | Simeon Sanielevici Issai Schur |
Isaac Jacob Schoenberg (April 21, 1903 – February 21, 1990) was a Romanian-American mathematician, known for his invention ofsplines.
Schoenberg was born inGalați to a Jewish family, the youngest of four children. He studied at theUniversity of Iași, receiving his M.A. in 1922. From 1922 to 1925 he studied at the Universities ofBerlin andGöttingen, working on a topic in analytic number theory suggested byIssai Schur. He presented his thesis to the University of Iași, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1926. In Göttingen, he metEdmund Landau, who arranged a visit for Schoenberg to theHebrew University of Jerusalem in 1928. During this visit, Schoenberg began his work ontotal positivity and variation-diminishinglinear transformations. In 1930, he returned from Jerusalem, and married Landau's daughter Charlotte in Berlin.
In 1930, he was awarded aRockefeller Fellowship, which enabled him to go to theUnited States, visiting theUniversity of Chicago,Harvard, and theInstitute for Advanced Study inPrinceton, New Jersey. From 1935, he taught atSwarthmore College andColby College. In 1941, he was appointed to the faculty at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. During 1943–1945 he was released from U. Penn. in order to perform war work as a mathematician at theAberdeen Proving Ground. It was during this time that he initiated the work for which he is most famous, the theory ofsplines.
In 1966 he moved to theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison where he became a member of the Mathematics Research Center. He remained there until he retired in 1973. In 1974 he won aLester R. Ford Award.[1]
He wrote about 175 papers on many disparate subjects. Around 50 of these were onSplines. He also wrote onApproximation theory, theKakeya problem, Polya frequency functions, and a problem ofEdmund Landau.His coauthors includedJohn von Neumann,Hans Rademacher,Theodore Motzkin,George Polya,A. S. Besicovitch,Gábor Szegő,Donald J. Newman,Richard Askey,Bernard Epstein andCarl de Boor.
