The Wavelet IDR Center
Special IDR Meeting
Constructive Mathematics: A meeting honoring Carl de
Boor
Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, May 26-30, 2003.
Organizers: Amos Ron and Hans-Peter Seidel
The meeting brings together leaders and other prominent researchers in the areas of Approximation Theory, Numerical Analysis, Wavelets, CAGD, and PDEs. The rapid technological advances in the last decade pose new challenges in these areas, and the meeting will be devoted to reviewing the progress made so far to this end, and to identifying fundamental problems in those areas which are pertinent to the current technological revolution.
The meeting is held in conjunction with the 65 Anniversary of Carl de Boor and his planned subsequent retirement. Carl de Boor is the worldwide leader and authority in the theory and application of spline functions. Commonly called splines, they were introduced in the mid-1940's to answer the important question of how to approximate and represent discrete data by smooth curves. Practical applications were delayed for 20 years until computers became powerful enough to carry out the requisite computations. Since then splines have become indispensable tools in a wealth of real-world settings including computer-aided design and manufacturing (in particular of cars and airplanes), the production of typesets for printing, in automated cartography, applications of computer graphics (including animation in videos and movies), the general areas of signal and image processing, and much more.
de Boor's approach to splines differed from the earlier prevailing ones and his has become the only way splines are viewed these days. His contributions have been more fundamental and numerous than any other researcher in the field of splines. They range from rigorous mathematical theories to highly efficient and reliable numerical algorithms to complete software packages.
His contributions to the mathematical sciences and to society at large have
resulted in his election to both the U.S. National Academy of Science and
the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Academia Leopoldina (Deutsche
Akademie der Naturforscher), and a foreign member of the Polish Academy of
Sciences. He had received a Humboldt Research Prize (Humboldt Foundation,
Germany), an Honorary degree from Purdue University (USA), and the John von
Neumann Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is
currently a Steenbock Professor of Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the
University of Wisconsin - Madison. He is a member of the Wavelet IDR Center
since its inception.
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