Heinz Voderberg

Spiral parquet flooring according to Voderberg

Heinz Voderberg (* 1911 ; † 1945 ) was a German mathematician.

Voderberg studied with Karl Reinhardt in Greifswald. From 1936 he completed his legal clerkship in Stettin and Greifswald. He was drafted in 1938 and then served in World War II. After being wounded in 1943, he spent a few months in Jena, where he researched mathematical geodesy with Robert König . He was then a soldier again and fell shortly before the end of the war when he and his unit tried to surrender (his death allowed the rest of his unit to be taken prisoner). During his time as a soldier, he wrote his dissertation, which he sent on postcards to his wife, who then typed it up. In early 1945 he corresponded with Heinrich Heesch .

Voderberg is known for being the first to find spiral-shaped tiling on the plain in 1936. He created it with a nine-cornered basic building block and thereby also solved a problem that his teacher Reinhardt considered unsolvable (you can find two congruent polyhedra that enclose a hole in such a way that two congruent polyhedra fit exactly into it). Further spiral-shaped tiling was found in the 1970s by Branko Grünbaum and Geoffrey C. Shephard and in 1980 by Doris Schattschneider and Marjorie Rice.

He was married to the botanist Käthe Voderberg and had two daughters with her. His daughter Linda (* 1938) continued her father's work in her diploma thesis.

The Voderberg double spirals are the logo of the Mathematical Institute of the University of Greifswald.

He was a member of the German Mathematicians Association .

Fonts

To break down the surroundings of a flat area into congruent, annual report of the German Mathematicians Association, Volume 46, 1936, pp. 229-231

Web links

Maths-Insel, Voderbergsche Neunecke and Voderbergsche Doppelspiralen

Remarks

↑ Michael Toeppell, members Complete index of the German Mathematical Association, Munich 1991
↑ Reinhardt himself solved one of David Hilbert's problems (part of the 18th problem): one can find a parquet flooring of space with polyhedra that are not fundamental areas of groups of movements. Heesch later found a solution to the analog plane problem.
^ The long way to equal opportunities, natural scientists at the Berlin University, Humboldt University Berlin, 2014, p. 41

personal data
SURNAME	Voderberg, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	1911
DATE OF DEATH	1945

[1] Michael Toeppell, members Complete index of the German Mathematical Association, Munich 1991

[2] Reinhardt himself solved one of David Hilbert's problems (part of the 18th problem): one can find a parquet flooring of space with polyhedra that are not fundamental areas of groups of movements. Heesch later found a solution to the analog plane problem.

[3] The long way to equal opportunities, natural scientists at the Berlin University, Humboldt University Berlin, 2014, p. 41