Person: Tverberg, Helge
Helge Tverberg was a Norwegian mathematician who worked in combinatorics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Tverberg was educated in Bergen and, in 1954, he entered the University of Bergen aiming to study mathematical sciences.
- There were no courses on combinatorics at Bergen at this time but in 1956 Tverberg discovered Dénes König's graph theory textbook Theorie der Endlichen und Unendlichen Graphen Ⓣ(Theory of finite and infinite graphs) (1936), the first textbook on graph theory which deals with topics such as Euler trails, Hamiltonian cycles, mazes, trees, directed graphs and factorisations.
- Tverberg was awarded the 'cand.real' degree by the University of Bergen in December 1958 and, on 1 January 1959, he was appointed as a senior lecturer at the University.
- Already by this time Tverberg had two papers in print, namely On two inequalities by S Selberg (1958) and A new derivation of the information function (1958).
- In 1960 Tverberg published in Math.
- Tverberg went to London, England, in 1961 to attend the instructional conference on Functional Analysis held at University College.
- This now presented Tverberg with a challenge on which, by 1963, he had made some progress by proving the 3-dimensional case.
- Helge Tverberg is friendly and generous, he loves intriguing questions and puzzles.
- Years later, someone vaguely familiar greeted Tverberg while out skiing, and it turned out that they had been in his class.
- This erstwhile student confessed regretfully that he could not claim to remember much about the course, but he still recalled that afternoon Tverberg had told them how to catch flies ....
- In 2001 a part of Discrete Mathematics was devoted to papers to honour Tverberg.
- The biographical pieces also had a dual purpose: certainly to record the key mathematical events in Helge Tverberg's life; but more to paint a contemporary picture of what it might be like to engage professionally in mathematics, a picture on a more human and accessible scale than that of giants of a distant past, such as Abel or Lie or Sylow, which otherwise would not exist.
Born 6 March 1935, Bergen, Norway. Died 28 December 2020, Bergen, Norway.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Norway
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- 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
