Theodore J. Rivlin
Theodore Joseph Rivlin | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 11, 1926 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Died | July 22, 2006 (aged 79) Croton-on-Hudson, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Mathematician |
| Known for | Expertise in approximation theory; author of "An Introduction to the Approximation of Functions" |
Theodore Joseph Rivlin (born 11 September 1926 in Brooklyn – died 22 July 2006 in Croton-on-Hudson) was an American mathematician known for his expertise in approximation theory. He gained wide recognition for his influential 1969 publication, An Introduction to the Approximation of Functions (reissued by Dover in 1981), which remains a foundational reference within the discipline.
Education and career
Rivlin completed his undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College in 1948. Following a year and a half of service in the United States Army Air Force, he enrolled at Harvard University for graduate education, where he earned his doctorate in 1953 under the supervision of Joseph L. Walsh. His dissertation focused on Overconvergent Taylor series and the zeroes of related polynomials. From 1952 through 1955, he held a teaching position in mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, subsequently joining New York University's Institute for Mathematics Sciences (later known as the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences) as a research associate from 1955 to 1956.
Between 1956 and 1959, Rivlin served as a senior mathematical analyst at the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation located in Deer Park, New York. There, he utilized approximation theory and Chebyshev polynomial techniques to enhance thermodynamic table computations. Beginning in 1959, he embarked on a nearly 35-year tenure as a research staff member at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center based in Yorktown Heights, New York. During his career, he took sabbaticals at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University (1969–1970) and the Mathematics Department of Imperial College London (1976–1977).
From 1966 until 1976, Rivlin held an adjunct professorship at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he taught courses on approximation theory. He contributed as an associate editor for the Journal of Approximation Theory and authored more than 80 scholarly articles addressing topics in approximation theory and computational mathematics. In recognition of his contributions, The Annals of Numerical Analysis dedicated a special issue in 1997 entitled The Heritage of P.L. Chebyshev: A Festschrift in honor of the 70th birthday of T.J. Rivlin.
Articles
- with Nesmith C. Ankeny: On a theorem of S. Bernstein, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 1955, 5 Suppl. 6, pp. 849–852
- with Harold S. Shapiro: A unified approach to certain problems of approximation and minimization, Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1961, 9(4), pp. 670–699
- with Richard Kelisky: Iterates of Bernstein polynomials, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 1967, 21(3), pp. 511–520
- with Charles A. Micchelli and Shmuel Winograd: The optimal recovery of smooth functions, Numerische Mathematik, 1976, 26(1), pp. 191–200
- with C. A. Micchelli: A survey of optimal recovery, in Optimal estimation in approximation theory, Springer, 1977, pp. 1–54
- with C. A. Micchelli: Lectures on optimal recovery, Numerical Analysis Lancaster 1984, Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol. 1129, 1985, pp. 21–93
Books
- An Introduction to the Approximation of Functions, Blaisdell, 1969; reissued by Dover Publications, 2003
- The Chebyshev Polynomials, Wiley, 1974; updated edition titled Chebyshev Polynomials: From Approximation Theory to Algebra and Number Theory, Wiley, 1990 (249 pages), featuring extended exercises and algebraic discussions