Harold Seymour Shapiro (2 April 1928[1] – 5 March 2021) was a professor of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, best known for inventing the so-called Shapiro polynomials (also known as Golay–Shapiro polynomials or Rudin–Shapiro polynomials) and for work on quadrature domains.[citation needed]
Harold Shapiro | |
---|---|
Born | New York, United States | April 2, 1928
Died | March 5, 2021 | (aged 92)
Citizenship | United States |
Alma mater | City College of New York MIT |
Known for | Shapiro polynomials |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Royal Institute of Technology |
Doctoral advisor | Norman Levinson |
His main research areas were approximation theory, complex analysis, functional analysis, and partial differential equations. He was also interested in the pedagogy of problem-solving.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, Shapiro earned a B.Sc. from the City College of New York in 1949 and earned his M.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. He received his Ph.D. in 1952 from MIT; his thesis was written under the supervision of Norman Levinson.[2] He was the father of cosmologist Max Tegmark, a graduate of the Royal Institute of Technology and now a professor at MIT.[citation needed] Shapiro died on 5 March 2021, aged 92.[3]
My beloved dad died peacefully this morning, after 92 inspiring orbits around the sun, retaining his dark humor and epic stoicism until the very end.