Joel H. Shapiro is an American mathematician, active in the field of composition operators. He is the author of the book Composition Operators and Classical Function Theory (ISBN 3540940677), and the American Mathematical Society memoir "Cyclic Phenomena for Composition Operators" (Memoirs of the American Math. Society #596, Vol. 125, 1997, pp. 1–105), with Paul Bourdon.

Shapiro completed his PhD thesis entitled "Linear Functionals on Non-Locally Convex Spaces" under the supervision of Allen Shields in 1969 at the University of Michigan. Upon graduating, he became a research associate at Queen's University, Canada, then from 1970 onwards was at Michigan State University, becoming a full professor in 1979. He stayed at Michigan until 2006, when he retired and became an adjunct professor at Portland State University in Oregon.

Shapiro discovered some of the properties of composition operators, including a study of the cyclic properties of such operators and the first calculations of the essential norm for composition operators on the Hardy spaces of the Unit disc.

The study of composition operators links some of the most basic questions you can ask about linear operators with beautiful classical results from analytic-function theory. The process invests old theorems with new mean ings, and bestows upon functional analysis an intriguing class of concrete linear operators. Best of all, the subject can be appreciated by anyone with an interest in function theory or functional analysis, and a background roughly equivalent to the following twelve chapters of Rudin's textbook Real and Complex Analysis [Rdn '87]: Chapters 1-7 (measure and integra tion, LP spaces, basic Hilbert and Banach space theory), and 10-14 (basic function theory through the Riemann Mapping Theorem). In this book I introduce the reader to both the theory of composition operators, and the classical results that form its infrastructure. I develop the subject in a way that emphasizes its geometric content, staying as much as possible within the prerequisites set out in the twelve fundamental chapters of Rudin's book. Although much of the material on operators is quite recent, this book is not intended to be an exhaustive survey. It is, quite simply, an invitation to join in the fun. The story goes something like this.