Schoenberg, I. J.

Isaac "Iso" Jacob Schoenberg (1903-1990) was born in Galatz, Romania, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Jassy [Iasi] in Moldavia in 1926. He came to the United States in 1930 on a Rockefeller fellowship where he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. In 1933 he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1933-1935). His major mathematical teaching posts were at the University of Pennsylvania (1941-1966) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1966-1973). He was released from work at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943-1945 to work at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, where he began his work on the theory of splines. Other research interests of Schoenberg include Pólya frequency functions and cardinal splines.