Person: Von Koch, Niels Fabian Helge
Helge von Koch is best known for the fractal Koch curve.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Von Koch attended a good school in Stockholm, completing his studies there in 1887.
- Von Koch spent some time at Uppsala University from 1888.
- Von Koch's first results were on infinitely many linear equations in infinitely many unknowns.
- The second of von Koch's papers was published in 1892, the year in which von Koch was awarded a doctorate for his thesis which contained the results of the two papers.
- Von Koch was awarded a doctorate in mathematics by Stockholm University on 26 May 1892.
- Between the years 1893 and 1905 von Koch had several appointements as an assistant professor of mathematics.
- Von Koch was then appointed to the chair of pure mathematics at the KTH.
- In July 1911 von Koch succeeded Mittag-Leffler as professor of mathematics at Stockholm University.
- Von Koch's snowflake.
- Von Koch is famous for the Koch curve which appears in his paper Sur une courbe continue sans tangente, obtenue par une construction géométrique élémentaire Ⓣ(On a continuous curve without tangent, obtained by an elementary geometrical construction) published in 1904.
- If one starts with an equilateral triangle and applies the construction, one gets the von Koch snowflake (sometimes called the von Koch star) as the limit of the construction.
- The von Koch snowflake is a continuous curve which does not have a tangent at any point.
- Von Koch's 1906 paper mainly consists of a proof of this fact.
- At the end of his paper, von Koch gives a geometric construction, based on the von Koch curve, of such a function which he also expresses analytically.
- Von Koch also wrote papers on number theory, in particular he wrote several papers on the prime number theorem such as Sur la distribution des nombres premiers Ⓣ(On the distribution of prime numbers) in 1901 and Contribution à la théorie des nombres premiers Ⓣ(Contribution to the theory of prime numbers) in 1910.
Born 25 January 1870, Stockholm, Sweden. Died 11 March 1924, Danderyd, Stockholm, Sweden.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Analysis, Geometry, Origin Sweden
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
