Helge von Koch

Nils Fabian Helge von Koch ( pronunciation : [ ˌhɛlːgə fɔnˈkɔkː ], born January 25, 1870 in Stockholm , † March 11, 1924 in Danderyd ) was a Swedish mathematician . He constructed the Koch curve named after him , one of the first fractals , as an example of an infinitely long curve that could not be differentiated at any point.

Helge von Koch

Life

Helge von Koch was the son of the Swedish officer and writer Richert Vogt von Koch and his wife Agathe Henriette Wrede. After school he studied mathematics with Gösta Mittag-Leffler at Stockholm University , which was then still called Högskola (Hochschule) . In 1891 he published a paper on the solution of differential equations , which was based in part on preliminary work by Henri Poincaré . A year later he received his doctorate with a thesis that included his and Poincaré's findings. From 1893 onwards, von Koch held various positions as assistant professor. In 1905 he accepted a professorship at the Royal Technical University in Stockholm and in 1911 he followed his former mentor Mittag-Leffler to his chair as professor of mathematics at Stockholm University. Among other things, he published works on number theory and prime numbers . Helge von Koch died on March 11, 1924.

With his work on the theory of infinite matrices and infinite systems of differential equations at the beginning of the 20th century, he was one of the founders of functional analysis . Some mathematicians wrongly believe that von Koch was a solid mathematician but did not achieve anything really new or groundbreaking in his subject. With Werner Heisenberg 's formulation of quantum mechanics as matrix mechanics in 1925, Koch's approach of infinite matrices as the representation of unlimited self-adjoint linear operators was a possible mathematical foundation for a new physical theory. Ultimately, quantum mechanics and functional analysis took a path independent of representation, and the theory of infinite matrices was more and more forgotten as an unwieldy formalism. Thus, Helge von Koch owes his current fame exclusively to the fractals named after him, the Koch curve , the Koch snowflake derived from it and the Koch island .

literature

• Koch, Nils Fabian Helge from . In: Theodor Westrin (Ed.): Nordisk familjebok konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi . 2nd Edition. tape 14 : Kikarskten – Kroman . Nordisk familjeboks förlag, Stockholm 1911, Sp. 456–457 (Swedish, runeberg.org - also his father Richert Vogt von Koch and his grandfather Nils Samuel von Koch).

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Helge von Koch. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Publications by Kochs in the yearbook database