Carl R. de Boor

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Carl R. de Boor (born 1937) is a mathematician and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin.

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[edit] Early life

Born in Stolp, Poland, as the 7th of 8 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 no doubt exacerbated by his father's status as an enemy of both the Fascist and Communist states. In 1955, young Carl took advantage of the temporary political thaw following Stalin's death in 1953, obtained a 1-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). Fortunately 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 renowned political scientist and constitutional scholar. With the support of the Friedrich family (whose matriarch regarded him as another grandson), 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).

[edit] Education and career

Armed with only a high school diploma after 3 and a half years of study at Hamburg University, de Boor entered Harvard 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. Although only half his grades were A's, he received his first degree, a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, in 1966, and then became an assistant professor at Purdue University. As was often the case with academic families of the period, Matilda took primary responsibility for raising their four children, enabling Carl, who felt a profound sense of obligation to his family as well, to burn the proverbial midnight oil and make a rapid ascent to full professor status by the age of 34. 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 by campus radicals in opposition to the Vietnam War.

[edit] 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 to the point of ubiquity in virtually all forms of industrial design. 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 successfully for the formulation of spline functions in terms of the basis splines, or B-splines developed by Schoenberg and Curry. He was an avid teacher, guiding numerous graduate students (with extreme rigor—one credits him for his decision to leave mathematics and become the executive vice president of network and data operations at America Online), and often waking up at 5:30 or 6:00 to prepare lecture notes for his classes in numerical approximation and linear algebra. He is the author of a number of works, including a fundamental introductory textbook on numerical analysis (with S.D. Conte) and a seminal textbook on spline approximation. Carl has also worked with Matlab extensively over the years and is the author of their 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 extensively. He currently lives on Orcas Island, in Washington state, with his second wife, Helen Bee, author of numerous fundamental texts in human development, to whom he has been married since 1991. In addition to his emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin, he is also an affiliated professor at the University of Washington.

[edit] Awards

In 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and he received the 2003 National Medal of Science in mathematics. Other honors have included election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987 and the National Academy of Engineering in 1993, honorary degrees from Purdue University and Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology), as well as membership in the Academia Leopoldina in Germany and the Polish Academy of Science. He won the John Von Neumann Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1996.

[edit] Personal

Carl is a lover of music -- especially classical, and more especially Johann Sebastian Bach -- walks, good food, and games of all sorts. If you play him at Clue, prepare to be beaten. He approaches such things quite systematically (ask to see his Hollerith card with the breakdown of all possible Rubik's cube single-step transformations), arriving at systems that invariably allow him to master the game.

In 1981, he bought his first personal computer, an Apple 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 the happy effect that one of them now makes his living as a programmer). 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 vastly improved implementations of a number of his children's favorite board games (no wonder another of his children increasingly makes a living as a game designer).

He is a lover of the quirky and easily enthralled by art. He used to keep a print of the Garden of Earthly Delights in his dining room, to the distress of some of his children, and others. He appears to live by the motto carpe diem, seeking to extract every possible observation and pleasure out of every day he lives, and encouraging others to do likewise, generally to their benefit.

Carl learned to play the cornet, as a child, to combat asthma. He was also fed a vast quantity of raw eggs, whipped with a sprinkle of sugar, to help strengthen him during his early, sickly years. As a father, he made his children eat such egg treats, calling them "special eggs" to encourage happy consumption.

During his Madison years, he played the bass drum in the neighborhood 4th of July Parade, and each August celebrates his arrival in America, where he is a committed citizen. Carl has pioneered the use of apple cider in cooking-most notably in the cooking of trout. He also diligently perfected a recipe for creme caramel.

[edit] References

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.
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