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Wolfgang Haken | |
|---|---|
 Haken in 2008 | |
| Born | June 21, 1928 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | October 2, 2022 (aged 94) |
| Alma mater | Kiel University |
| Known for | Solving the four-color theorem |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| Doctoral advisor | Karl-Heinrich Weise |
Wolfgang Haken (German: [ˈvɔlfɡaŋ ˈhaːkn̩]; June 21, 1928 – October 2, 2022) was a German American mathematician who specialized in topology, in particular 3-manifolds.
Biography
Haken was born on June 21, 1928, in Berlin, Germany. His father was Werner Haken, a physicist who had Max Planck as a doctoral thesis advisor.[1] In 1953, Haken earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Kiel University) and married Anna-Irmgard von Bredow, who earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the same university in 1959. In 1962, they left Germany so he could accept a position as visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He became a full professor in 1965, retiring in 1998.
In 1976, together with colleague Kenneth Appel at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Haken solved the four-color problem: they proved that any planar graph can be properly colored using at most four colors. Haken has introduced several ideas, including Haken manifolds, Kneser-Haken finiteness, and an expansion of the work of Kneser into a theory of normal surfaces. Much of his work has an algorithmic aspect, and he is a figure in algorithmic topology. One of his key contributions to this field is an algorithm to detect whether a knot is unknotted.
In 1978, Haken delivered an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki.[2] He was a recipient of the 1979 Fulkerson Prize of the American Mathematical Society for his proof with Appel of the four-color theorem.[3]
Haken died in Champaign, Illinois, on October 2, 2022, aged 94.[4]
Family
Haken's eldest son, Armin, proved that there exist propositional tautologies that require resolution proofs of exponential size.[5] Haken's eldest daughter, Dorothea Blostein, is a professor of computer science, known for her discovery of the master theorem for divide-and-conquer recurrences. Haken’s second son, Lippold, is the inventor of the Continuum Fingerboard. Haken’s youngest son, Rudolf, is a professor of music, who established the world's first Electric Strings university degree program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[6] Wolfgang is the cousin of Hermann Haken, a physicist known for laser theory and synergetics.
See also
References
- ^ Werner Haken, Beitrag zur Kenntnis der thermoelektrischen Eigenschaften der Metallegierungen. Accessed May 6, 2019
- ^ International Congress of Mathematicians 1978. International Mathematical Union. Accessed May 29, 2011
- ^ Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize, American Mathematical Society. Accessed May 29, 2011
- ^ "Wolfgang Haken's obituary". news-gazette.com. October 13, 2022. Archived from the original on October 14, 2022. Retrieved October 14, 2022.
- ^ Avi Wigderson, Mathematics and Computation, March 27 2018, footnote at Theorem 6.11
- ^ University of Illinois Electric Strings Degree Program Accessed November 15, 2022
- Haken, W. "Theorie der Normalflachen." Acta Math. 105, 245–375, 1961.
- Ilya Kapovich (2016). "Wolfgang Haken: A biographical sketch". Illinois Journal of Mathematics. 60 (1): iii–ix.
External links
- Wolfgang Haken memorial website
- Wolfgang Haken at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Haken's faculty page at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Wolfgang Haken biography from World of Mathematics
- Lippold Haken's life story
- Haken, Armin (1985), "The intractability of resolution", Theoretical Computer Science, 39: 297–308, doi:10.1016/0304-3975(85)90144-6
- Appel, Kenneth; Haken, Wolfgang (1989), Every Planar Map is Four Colorable, AMS, p. xv, ISBN 0-8218-5103-9
- Callahan, Patrick; Kapovich, Ilya; Lackenby, Marc; Shalen, Peter; Wilson, Robin (October 2023). "Wolfgang Haken, 1928–2022" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 70 (9): 1573–1587. doi:10.1090/noti2781.
