Alfred Inselberg (Hebrew: אלפרד אינסלברג) (22 October 1936,Athens,Greece – 30 December 2019,Tel Aviv,Israel)[1] was anAmerican-Israeli mathematician and computer scientist based atTel Aviv University.
Inselberg started his career at theBiological Computer Laboratory based atUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[2] He was part of acybernetics group working onbiomathematics developing mathematical models of the ear,neural networks, and computer models for vision and non-linear analysis, gaining a PhD[2] in mathematics and physics. During this period he participated in theSymposium on Principles of Self-Organization.[3] He is particularly noted for his work onparallel coordinates[4][5][6] (||-coords), which he proposed in 1959, for the visualization of multidimensional geometries (as in linear algebra) and multivariate problems.
Inselberg was born inAthens,Greece. Later he attendedWhittingehame College inBrighton,England. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) receiving a B.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering. Together with Gary van Sant, and two other students under the guidance of Paul Torda, they founded the University of Illinois Rocket Society in 1953; four years prior to Sputnik. Continuing his studies at UIUC he obtained in 1965 a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Physics under the joint guidance of Ray Langebartel andHeinz von Foerster.
Inselberg held senior research positions at IBM where he developed a mathematical model of the ear (cochlea) (Time November 1974) and later collision-avoidance algorithms for air traffic control (3 USA patents). Concurrently he had joint appointments at UCLA, USC, Technion and Ben Gurion University. Since 1995 he has been a professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences ofTel Aviv University. He was elected senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputing Center in 1996. His textbook on "Parallel Coordinates: Visual Multidimensional Geometry", was published by Springer.
