Carl R. de Boor

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Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor
Born	3 December 1937 (1937-12-03) (age 84) Stolp, Germany (present-day Słupsk, Poland)
Alma mater	University of Michigan
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

Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor (born 3 December 1937) is a German-American mathematician and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In 1993, de Boor was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to numerical analysis and methods in particular numerical tools used in computer-aided design.

Early life

Born in Stolp, Germany (now, as part of Poland, called Słupsk), 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 in Schwerin, then part of East 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 following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, obtained a one-month visa to West Germany and biked there, then decided to stay when he learned there that his application to Humboldt University (in East 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 of Carl 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 read Beatrix Potter when he boarded the boat).

Education and career

Having earned only a high school diploma after three and a half years of study at Hamburg University, de Boor entered Harvard University as a graduate student of mathematics. After working for a year as a research assistant to Garrett Birkhoff, he went to work for General Motors Research in Warren, Michigan, where he met splines. He received his first postgraduate degree, a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, in 1966, and then became an assistant professor at Purdue University. In 1972, he accepted a position as professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, working out of the UW's Army Math Research Center, which had recently been bombed in opposition to the Vietnam War.

Research and teaching

A chief attraction of the UW job was the opportunity to work directly with Isaac Schoenberg, considered the father of splines, the piecewise polynomials de Boor would further develop. In particular, he formulated a relatively fast and numerically stable algorithm for calculating the values of splines (used extensively in computer-aided design and computer graphics), and advocated for the formulation of spline functions in terms of the basis splines, or B-splines developed by Schoenberg and Curry. 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 with MATLAB extensively over the years and is the author of the Spline Toolbox.

Carl de Boor retired from the University 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 on Orcas Island, in Washington state, with his second wife, Helen Bee, author of texts in human development, to whom he has been married since 1991. In addition to his emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he is also an affiliated professor at the University of Washington.

드 보아는 톰슨 사이언티픽 컴퍼니 ISI 지식의 웹에 의해 수학에서 ISI 고도로 인용된 저자로 등재되었다.^[1]

수상

1997년에 그는 국립과학아카데미에 선출되었고, 2003년 수학에서 국립과학훈장을 받았다.^[2] 다른 영예로는 1987년 미국 예술 과학 아카데미와 1993년 국립 공학 아카데미, 퍼듀 대학교와 테크니온의 명예 학위, 그리고 독일의 독일 과학 아카데미와 폴란드 과학 아카데미의 회원권이 있다. 1996년 산업응용수학협회로부터 존 폰 노이만 강의상을 수상하였고, 존 A도 수상하였다. 2009년 그레고리상 기하학적 디자인상.

개인적인

칼은 음악을 사랑하는 사람이다. 특히 클래식 음악, 특히 요한 세바스티안 바흐는 걷기, 좋은 음식, 그리고 모든 종류의 게임을 좋아한다. 1981년, 그는 그의 첫 번째 개인용 컴퓨터인 32KB의 메모리와 오래된 릴 대 릴 테이프 레코더를 저장 프로그램에 연결한 애플 II를 구입했다. 그는 아이들에게 그들이 하고 싶은 컴퓨터 게임을 쓰라고 요구했다. 그들과 함께 그는 R 키가 마침내 닳았을 때 새로운 거래를 기록하기 위해 Z 키를 사용하기 위해 프로그램을 편집해야 했지만, 아이들이 가장 좋아하는 보드 게임을 많이 구현하기 위해 아이들이 대학에 간 후에도 오랫동안 계속 사용했던 수표책을 추적하기 위한 회계 프로그램을 작성했다.

그는 괴짜의 애인이며 쉽게 예술에 매료된다. 그는 자기 식당에 지구 기쁨의 정원 인쇄물을 넣어 두곤 했는데, 그의 아이들 중 몇몇과 다른 사람들의 괴로움까지 말이다.

칼은 어렸을 때 천식과 싸우기 위해 코넷을 연주하는 법을 배웠다. 그는 또한 그의 초기와 병든 세월 동안 그를 강화시키기 위해 설탕을 뿌린 많은 양의 날 달걀을 먹였다. 아버지로서 그는 자식들에게 그런 달걀 간식을 먹게 했다.

매디슨 시절, 그는 7월 4일 퍼레이드에서 베이스 드럼을 연주했고, 매년 8월에는 그가 시민인 미국에 도착하는 것을 축하한다.

References

• Carl de Boor's curriculum vitae
• Y.K. Leong, Carl de Boor: On wings of splines, Imprints (newsletter of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore), Issue 5, 2004.

Selected publications by Carl de Boor:

• C. de Boor, On calculating with B-splines, J. Approx. Theory 6 (1972), 50–62.
• C. de Boor, A Practical Guide to Splines, Springer-Verlag, 1978.
• C. de Boor and S.D. Conte, Elementary numerical analysis, an algorithmic approach, McGraw-Hill, 1972 / 2000.
• C. de Boor, K. Hoellig and S. Riemenschneider, Box splines, Springer-Verlag, 1993.