Walter Gautschi | |
|---|---|
| Born | Walter Gautschi (1927-12-11)December 11, 1927 (age 97) |
| Nationality |
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| Alma mater | University of Basel |
| Occupation(s) | Mathematician, professor and writer |
| Employer | Purdue University |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
Walter Gautschi (/ˈɡaʊtʃi/;GOW-chee; born December 11, 1927) is a Swiss-born Americanmathematician,writer andprofessor emeritus ofComputer science andMathematics atPurdue University inWest Lafayette, Indiana.[1] He is primarily known for his contributions tonumerical analysis[2] and has authored over 200 papers in his area and published four books.
Gautschi was born December 11, 1927, inBasel, Switzerland, to Heinrich Gautschi (1901-1975). His paternal family originally hailed fromReinach. His patrilineal uncle, Adolf Eduard Gautschi, was a custodian and landscape painter.[3] He had one twin brother Werner (1927-1959). He completed aPh.D. inmathematics from theUniversity of Basel on the thesisAnalyse graphischer Integrationsmethoden advised byAlexander Ostrowski andAndreas Speiser (1953).[4]
Since then, he did postdoctoral work as a Janggen-Pöhn Research, Fellow at theIstituto Nazionale per le Applicazioni del Calcolo inRome (1954) and at theHarvard Computation Laboratory (1955). He had positions at theNational Bureau of Standards (1956–59), theAmerican University inWashington, D.C., theOak Ridge National Laboratory (1959–63) before joiningPurdue University where he has worked from 1963 to 2000 and now beingprofessor emeritus. He has been aFulbright Scholar at theTechnical University of Munich (1970) and held visiting appointments at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison (1976),Argonne National Laboratory, theWright-Patterson Air Force Base,ETH Zurich (1996-2001), theUniversity of Padova (1997), and theUniversity of Basel (2000).[5]
As well-known (e.g. Gerhard Wanner, Genevac. 2011 and the well-known first-hand sources and subsequent reports such as Math. Intelligencer, etc), one of Gautschi's most important contributions on numerical simulation of special functions offered evidence and confidence tode Branges's tour-de-force attack on the elusiveBieberbach conjecture on the magnitude of coefficients of schlicht functions, which hitherto received only slow, difficult and partial progress by work of Bieberbach, Loewner, Gabaredian and Schiffer.
In 1960, Gautschi married Erika, who was previously married to his twin brother Werner (1927-1959). Werner was also an academic professor and lecturer and emigrated to theUnited States with his wife in 1956. After his sudden death, Erika returned to Switzerland, while being pregnant with her child toBasel where she met Walter and married him in 1960.[6] They had three daughters;
Through his predeceased twin brother, he has stepson/nephew, Thomas (b. 1960). Gautschi still resides inWest Lafayette, Indiana.
