Harold S. Shapiro

For other people with the same name, see Harold Shapiro (disambiguation).

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	(1928-04-02)April 2, 1928 New York, United States
Died	March 5, 2021(2021-03-05) (aged 92) Stockholm, Sweden
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

Biography

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]

Academic career

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. He collaborated with Paul Erdős in June 1965 on "Large and small subspaces of Hilbert space", therefore he has an Erdős number of 1.

See also

• Rudin–Shapiro sequence
• List of Jewish mathematicians