Harold Seymour Shapiro (2 April 1928[1] – 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.

[citation needed] Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, Shapiro earned a B.Sc.

He received his Ph.D. in 1952 from MIT; his thesis was written under the supervision of Norman Levinson.

[2] He was the father of cosmologist Max Tegmark, a graduate of the Royal Institute of Technology and now a professor at MIT.

[citation needed] Shapiro died on 5 March 2021, aged 92.