Karl Gustafson

Karl Gustafson is a professor emeritus of the Mathematics Department of the University of Colorado, where he taught for more than fifty years, until his retirement in 2020. He was born in 1935 in Manchester, Iowa, and moved with his family to Boulder in 1948. As a pioneering young rock climber, Gustafson and his companions were at the forefront of the sport of free climbing in the region. Gustafson graduated from Boulder High School in 1953 and from the University of Colorado in 1958. He earned...See more

Karl Gustafson is a professor emeritus of the Mathematics Department of the University of Colorado, where he taught for more than fifty years, until his retirement in 2020. He was born in 1935 in Manchester, Iowa, and moved with his family to Boulder in 1948. As a pioneering young rock climber, Gustafson and his companions were at the forefront of the sport of free climbing in the region. Gustafson graduated from Boulder High School in 1953 and from the University of Colorado in 1958. He earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1965, after serving in naval intelligence. Following postdoctoral work in Switzerland and Italy, in 1968 he returned to Boulder, where he continues to live. He became the honoree of an endowed faculty chair at the University of Colorado in 2022. Gustafson's previous books include Introduction to Partial Differential Equations (Wiley 1980, Dover 1999), The Crossing of Heaven: Memoirs of a Mathematician (Springer 2012), Antieigen value Analysis: With Applications to Numerical Analysis, Wave lets, Statistics, Quantum Mechanics, Finance, and Optimization (World Scientific 2012), and Reverberations of a Stroke (Springer-Nature 2019). See less