Isaac Jacob Schoenberg (April 21, 1903 – February 21, 1990) was a Romanian-American mathematician, known for his invention of splines.

Life and career

Schoenberg was born in Galați. He studied at the

University of Iași The Alexandru Ioan Cuza University ( Romanian: ''Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza"''; acronym: UAIC) is a public university located in Iași, Romania. Founded by an 1860 decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza, under whom the former Academia M ...

, receiving his M.A. in 1922. From 1922 to 1925 he studied at the Universities of

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

and

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The ori ...

, working on a topic in analytic number theory suggested by

Issai Schur Issai Schur (10 January 1875 – 10 January 1941) was a Russian mathematician who worked in Germany for most of his life. He studied at the University of Berlin. He obtained his doctorate in 1901, became lecturer in 1903 and, after a stay at th ...

. He presented his thesis to the University of Iași, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1926. In Göttingen, he met

Edmund Landau Edmund Georg Hermann Landau (14 February 1877 – 19 February 1938) was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis. Biography Edmund Landau was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. His father was Leopol ...

, who arranged a visit for Schoenberg to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1928. During this visit, Schoenberg began his work on total positivity and variation-diminishing

linear transformations In mathematics, and more specifically in linear algebra, a linear map (also called a linear mapping, linear transformation, vector space homomorphism, or in some contexts linear function) is a mapping V \to W between two vector spaces that pre ...

. In 1930, he returned from Jerusalem, and married Landau's daughter Charlotte in Berlin. In 1930, he was awarded a

Rockefeller Fellowship The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Ca ...

, which enabled him to go to the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

, visiting the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

, Harvard, and the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of whi ...

. From 1935, he taught at Swarthmore College and

Colby College Colby College is a private liberal arts college in Waterville, Maine. It was founded in 1813 as the Maine Literary and Theological Institution, then renamed Waterville College after the city where it resides. The donations of Christian philant ...

. In 1941, he was appointed to the faculty at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

. During 1943–1945 he was released from U. Penn. in order to perform war work as a mathematician at the

Aberdeen Proving Ground Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) (sometimes erroneously called Aberdeen Proving ''Grounds'') is a U.S. Army facility located adjacent to Aberdeen, Harford County, Maryland, United States. More than 7,500 civilians and 5,000 military personnel work a ...

. It was during this time that he initiated the work for which he is most famous, the theory of splines. In 1966 he moved to the

University of Wisconsin–Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...

where he became a member of the Mathematics Research Center. He remained there until he retired in 1973. In 1974 he won a Lester R. Ford Award.

Books

* * *I. J. Schoenberg Selected Papers
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Papers

He wrote about 175 papers on many disparate subjects. Around 50 of these were on Splines. He also wrote on Approximation theory, the Kakeya problem, Polya frequency functions, and a problem of

. His coauthors included

John von Neumann John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...

Hans Rademacher Hans Adolph Rademacher (; 3 April 1892, Wandsbeck, now Hamburg-Wandsbek – 7 February 1969, Haverford, Pennsylvania, USA) was a German-born American mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis and number theory. Biography Rademacher r ...

Theodore Motzkin Theodore Samuel Motzkin (26 March 1908 – 15 December 1970) was an Israeli-American mathematician. Biography Motzkin's father Leo Motzkin, a Ukrainian Jew, went to Berlin at the age of thirteen to study mathematics. He pursued university stud ...

, George Polya, A. S. Besicovitch,

Gábor Szegő Gábor Szegő () (January 20, 1895 – August 7, 1985) was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He was one of the foremost mathematical analysts of his generation and made fundamental contributions to the theory of orthogonal polynomials and ...

, Donald J. Newman, Richard Askey, Bernard Epstein and

Carl de Boor 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 contr ...

References

* Schoenberg, Contributions to the problem of approximation of equidistant data by analytic functions, ''Quart. Appl. Math.,'' vol. 4, pp. 45–99 and 112–141, 1946.

External links

* *
Schoenberg, Isaac Jacob (HAT = History of Approximation Theory website)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schoenberg, Isaac Jacob 1903 births 1990 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians Romanian mathematicians People from Galați Romanian people of Jewish descent Romanian emigrants to the United States Alexandru Ioan Cuza University alumni Swarthmore College faculty University of Pennsylvania faculty Mathematicians at the University of Pennsylvania University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty Rockefeller Fellows

Life and career

Books

Papers

See also

References

External links