Carl R. de Boor

This poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Carl R. de Boor" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message )

Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor
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

when he boarded the boat).

Education and career

Having earned only a high school diploma after three and a half years of study at

.

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

.

de Boor has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Mathematics by the

Awards

In 1997 he was elected to the

Award of Geometric Design in 2009.

Personal

Carl is a lover of music—especially classical, and more especially Johann Sebastian Bach—walks, good food, and games of all sorts. In 1981, he bought his first personal computer, an

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 of The Garden of Earthly Delights in his dining room, to the distress of some of his children and others.

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, 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 neighborhood

parade, and each August celebrates his arrival in the United States, where he is a citizen.

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.