Egbert van Kampen
Egbert Rudolf van Kampen (born May 28, 1908 in Berchem , Antwerp Province , Belgium ; † February 11, 1942 in Baltimore , USA ) was a Dutch mathematician who is still known today for his work in algebraic topology (for example duality theorems).
Life
Van Kampen was born the son of a Dutch accountant while he was working in Belgium. Van Kampen went to school in The Hague, where he stood out for his mathematical talent. In 1924 he began to study at the University of Leiden . After graduating in 1927, he attended the University of Göttingen , where he met Bartel Leendert van der Waerden and Pawel Alexandrow , who were interested in topology. In 1929 he received his doctorate in Leiden with Willem van der Woude (The combinatorial topology and the duality theorems) . In 1928 he was in Hamburg with Emil Artin , which led to his first publication, in which he refuted an assumption made by Artin from the knot theory by means of a counterexample. In 1930 he became the assistant of Jan Schouten in Delft, with whom he published on his specialty tensor analysis. In 1931 he went to the USA and was an assistant at the Johns Hopkins University , where he Oscar Zariski hit what Zariski-van-Kampen-set of the group-theoretical representation (by generators and relations) in the fundamental group of the complement of an algebraic curve reflected found . In 1933 he published a work that contained the van Kampen theorem (also called Seifert-van-Kampen's theorem ) about the calculation of the fundamental group of topological spaces from the fundamental groups of (path-connected) subspaces that cover. From 1933 he was also in John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he worked on duality sets of algebraic topology, the recently Lew Pontrjagin compact for the special case of abelian groups (proved today why Pontrjagin van Kampen duality called ). The collaboration with von Neumann and the acquaintance with Aurel Wintner at Johns Hopkins University led to work on almost periodic functions in 1937 . He also worked with Mark Kac and Paul Erdős . He was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1930s. He was operated on several times, but died of this disease in early 1942.
literature
- R. Fokkink: Van Kampen - an unknown famous mathematician. Nieuw Archief for Wiskunde, May 2004 (Dutch).
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Egbert van Kampen. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
Individual evidence
- ^ Van Kampen: On the connection between the fundamental groups of some related spaces. American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 55, 1933, pp. 261-267.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kampen, Egbert van |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kampen, Egbertus Rudolf van (full name); Kampen, Egbert Rudolf van; Van Kampen, ER |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 28, 1908 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berchem , Antwerp, Belgium |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 11, 1942 |
| Place of death | Baltimore , Maryland, USA |