Alberto Pedro Calderón (September 14, 1920 – April 16, 1998) was an Argentine mathematician best known for his work on the theory of partial differential equations and singular integral operators, and widely considered as one of the 20th century's most important mathematicians. He was born in Mendoza, and died in Chicago.

Calderón graduated in civil engineering from the University of Buenos Aires in 1947 and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1950.

In 1958 Calderón published one of his most important results, on uniqueness of solution of the Cauchy problem for partial differential equations. With his Ph.D. supervisor and mentor Antoni Zygmund he formulated the Calderón–Zygmund lemma of singular integral operators.

During his career he held academic posts at Ohio State University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, from which he retired in 1985. He was awarded many prizes for his work including the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1975, the Wolf Prize in 1989, and the National Medal of Science in 1991[1]. Calderón has an Erdős number of 3.

The Calderón prize of the Inverse Problems International Association is named in his honor.[2]

See also

* Calderón–Toeplitz operator

References

1. ^ National Science Foundation - The President's National Medal of Science
2. ^ Calderon Prize

Bibliography

* The book Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations: Essays in Honor of Alberto Calderón by Cora Sadosky, Alberto P. Calderón and Carlos Kenig, University of Chicago Press, 1999, ISBN 0226104567, has a biographical essay in the introduction, as well as giving an idea of the breadth impact of his work.
* Calderon, A. P.; Zygmund, A. (1952), "On the existence of certain singular integrals", Acta Mathematica 88 (1): 85–139, doi:10.1007/BF02392130, MR0052553, Zbl 0047.10201, ISSN 0001-5962, http://www.springerlink.com/content/u8072477m7673215/?p=5160d84401524494aa878183e4c7b6d4&pi=0 . This is one of the key papers on singular integral operators.

External links

* O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Alberto Calderón", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Calderon.html .
* Alberto Calderón at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
* Obituary, University of Chicago Chronicle
* Biography by Ann T Keene (American National Biography Online)
* Obituary in Notices of the AMS