Carl R. de Boor - Research and Teaching

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 numerous 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.

de Boor has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Mathematics by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.