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Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor | |
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| Born | 3 December 1937 (1937-12-03) (age 87) |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan (Ph.D.) Harvard University Hamburg University |
| Awards | John von Neumann Prize (1996) National Medal of Science (2003) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics (Numerical analysis) |
| Institutions | Purdue University University of Wisconsin–Madison University of Washington |
| Thesis | The Method Of Projections As Applied To The Numerical Solution Of Two Point Boundary Value Problems Using Cubic Splines (1966) |
Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor (born 3 December 1937) is an Americanmathematician and professor emeritus at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison.
In 1993, de Boor was elected as a member into theNational Academy of Engineering for contributions to numerical analysis and methods in particular numerical tools used in computer-aided design.
Born inStolp, Germany (now, as part of Poland, calledSłupsk), as the seventh of eight children born to Werner (an anti-Nazi Lutheran minister) and Toni de Boor in 1937, he fled in 1945 with his family, settling eventually inSchwerin, then part ofEast Germany. As a child, he was often ill, suffering from a variety of conditions. In 1955, young Carl took advantage of the temporary political thaw followingJoseph Stalin's death in 1953, obtained a one-month visa toWest Germany and biked there, then decided to stay when he learned there that his application toHumboldt University (inEast Berlin) for the study of chemistry had been turned down (because of his poor performance in mathematics). However,Otto Friedrich (a brother of Carl's father's first wife) was willing and able to help him. Two years later, he met and fell in love with Otto's niece, Matilda Friedrich, the daughter ofCarl Friedrich, the political scientist and constitutional scholar. With the support of the Friedrich family, Carl emigrated to the United States in 1959, learning English on his trip across the Atlantic (he could readBeatrix Potter when he boarded the boat).
Having earned only a high school diploma after three and a half years of study atHamburg University, de Boor enteredHarvard University as a graduate student of mathematics. After working for a year as a research assistant toGarrett Birkhoff, he went to work forGeneral Motors Research inWarren, Michigan, where he metsplines. He received his first postgraduate degree, a Ph.D. from theUniversity of Michigan, in 1966, and then became an assistant professor atPurdue University. In 1972, he accepted a position as professor of mathematics and computer science at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, working out of the UW's Army Math Research Center, which hadrecently been bombed in opposition to theVietnam War.
A chief attraction of the UW job was the opportunity to work directly withIsaac Schoenberg, considered the father of splines, the piecewise polynomials de Boor would further develop. In particular, he formulated a relatively fast and numerically stablealgorithm for calculating the values ofsplines (used extensively incomputer-aided design andcomputer graphics), and advocated for the formulation of spline functions in terms of the basis splines, orB-splines developed bySchoenberg andCurry.He was a teacher, guiding numerous graduate students. He is the author of a number of works, including an introductory textbook on numerical analysis (with S.D. Conte) and a textbook on spline approximation. Carl has also worked withMATLAB extensively over the years and is the author of the Spline Toolbox.
Carl de Boor retired from theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison in 2003 and relocated to the Pacific Northwest, where he continues to work with colleagues on mathematical problems, and to travel. He currently lives onOrcas Island, inWashington state, with his second wife,Helen Bee, author of texts inhuman development, to whom he has been married since 1991. In addition to his emeritus status at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, he is also an affiliated professor at theUniversity of Washington.
de Boor has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Mathematics by theISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.[1]
In 1997 he was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences, and he received the 2003National Medal of Science inmathematics.[2] Other honors have included election to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987 and theNational Academy of Engineering in 1993, honorary degrees fromPurdue University andTechnion (the Israel Institute of Technology), as well as membership in theGerman Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in Germany and thePolish Academy of Sciences. He won theJohn von Neumann Lecture Prize from theSociety for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1996 and theJohn A. Gregory Award of Geometric Design in 2009.
Carl is a lover of music—especially classical, and more especiallyJohann Sebastian Bach—walks, good food, and games of all sorts. In 1981, he bought his first personal computer, anApple II with 32KB of memory with an old reel-to-reel tape recorder hooked up to store programs. He required his children to write any computer games they wished to play. With them he wrote an accounting program for tracking his checkbook, which he kept using long after the kids went to college, though he had to edit the program to use the Z key for recording a new transaction when the R key finally wore out, as well as implementations of a number of his children's favorite board games.
He is a lover of the quirky and easily enthralled by art. He used to keep a print ofThe Garden of Earthly Delights in his dining room, to the distress of some of his children and others.
Carl learned to play thecornet, as a child, to combatasthma. He was also fed a vast quantity of raw eggs, whipped with a sprinkle of sugar, supposedly to help strengthen him during his early, sickly years. As a father, he made his children eat such egg treats.
During his Madison years, he played the bass drum in the neighborhoodFourth of July parade, and each August celebrates his arrival in the United States, where he is a citizen.
Selected publications by Carl de Boor:
