Harold S. Shapiro

Harold Seymour Shapiro (2 April 1928 – 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.

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. He was the father of cosmologist Max Tegmark, a graduate of the Royal Institute of Technology and now a professor at MIT. Shapiro died on 5 March 2021, aged 92.

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.