Isaac Jacob Schoenberg

Schoenberg in 1971

Isaac "Iso" Jacob Schoenberg (born April 21, 1903 , Galați , Romania , † February 21, 1990 ) was a Romanian-American mathematician, known for the discovery of splines .

He was the son of a doctor and studied mathematics at the University of Jassy and after graduation from 1922 in Berlin (with Issai Schur ) and Göttingen. In 1926 he received his doctorate in Jassy with a thesis on analytical number theory, inspired by Schur. In 1928, through Edmund Landau's mediation , he was at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem . In 1930 he married Landau's daughter Charlotte. In 1930 he went to the USA on a Rockefeller scholarship, was with Gilbert Ames Bliss at the University of Chicago , was at Harvard University , from 1933 to 1935 at the Institute for Advanced Study , taught at Swarthmore and Colby College and from 1941 at the University of Pennsylvania . From 1943 to 1945 he was engaged in war-related research at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, the US Army's ballistic research center. Here he began to deal with splines and published about it in 1946. From 1966 until his retirement in 1973 he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison . Even after his retirement he remained scientifically active.

In addition to splines and their application in approximation theory and for solving differential equations, he also dealt with polynomials with real zeros and the embedding of metric spaces in Hilbert spaces.

His sister was married to Hans Rademacher .

literature

• 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.
• Karlin, To IJ Schoenberg and His Mathematics, J. Approximation Theory, Vol. 8, pp. Vi-ix, 1973.

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Isaac Jacob Schoenberg. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .