Axel Thue

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Axel Thue

Axel Thue (born February 19, 1863 in Tønsberg , Norway ; † March 7, 1922 in Oslo ) was a Norwegian mathematician , known for his contributions to combinatorics and his work on number theory ( Diophantine approximations , Diophantine equations ).

life and work

Thue went to school in Oslo and studied physics and mathematics at the University of Oslo from 1883 to 1889. In 1889 he received his doctorate in Oslo with Elling Holst . In 1890 he continued his studies in Leipzig with Sophus Lie and in Berlin, where he attended lectures with Hermann von Helmholtz , Leopold Kronecker and Lazarus Fuchs . In 1891 he returned to Oslo, where he received a scholarship to do mathematical research. In 1894 he married and began teaching at the forerunner of the Technical University in Trondheim . In 1903 he became a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Oslo .

In 1909 he proved a sentence which later became Thue-Siegel-Roth's sentence through the additions by Carl Ludwig Siegel (1920) and Klaus Friedrich Roth (1958) .

In 1910 he introduced the word problem for term replacement systems . In 1914 a follow-up work appeared in which he related the word problem or Thue problem with the problem of holding . While the first work from 1910 was hardly noticed, the work from 1914 was taken up, for example for Emil Post , who in 1947 showed that Thue's word replacement problem was undecidable. Subsequently, Thue systems and Semi-Thue systems were named after Thue.

In 1910 he proved that the hexagonal arrangement is the closest packing of spheres in two dimensions (later completed by László Fejes Tóth ).

His only known PhD student was Albert Thoralf Skolem .

Fonts

  • T. Nagel, Atle Selberg, S. Selberg, K. Thalberg (editors): Selected Mathematical Papers of Axel Thue , Oslo, Universitetsforlaget 1977

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ Thue on approximate values ​​of algebraic numbers , Journal für Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, Volume 135, 1909, p. 284, online
  3. ^ Thue The solution of a special case of a general logical problem , Kra. Vid.-Selsk. Scrifter I, Mat. Nat. Kl., Oslo, 1910, no.8
  4. ↑ Problems about changes in strings of characters according to given rules , Kra. Vid.-Selsk. Scrifter I, Mat. Nat. Kl., Oslo, 1914, No. 10
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Thomas: "When nobody else dreamed of these things" - Axel Thue and the term replacement. In: Computer Science Spectrum. Volume 33, Number 5, pp. 504-508, doi : 10.1007 / s00287-010-0468-9 .
personal data
SURNAME Thue, Axel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Tonsberg , Norway
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1922
Place of death Oslo