Niels Fabian Helge von Koch

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Niels Fabian Helge von Koch
Niels Fabian Helge von Koch
Born	(1870-01-25)25 January 1870 Stockholm, Sweden
Died	11 March 1924(1924-03-11) (aged 54) Danderyd Municipality, Sweden
Nationality	Swedish
Alma mater	Stockholm University College, Uppsala University
Known for	Koch snowflake
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University College

Niels Fabian Helge von Koch (25 January 1870 – 11 March 1924) was a Swedish mathematician who gave his name to the famous fractal known as the Koch snowflake, one of the earliest fractal curves to be described.

He was born to Swedish nobility. His grandfather, Nils Samuel von Koch (1801–1881), was the Chancellor of Justice. His father, Richert Vogt von Koch (1838–1913) was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Life Guards of Horse of the Swedish Army. He was enrolled at the newly created Stockholm University College in 1887 (studying under Gösta Mittag-Leffler), and at Uppsala University in 1888, where he also received his bachelor's degree (filosofie kandidat) since the non-governmental college in Stockholm had not yet received the rights to issue degrees. He received his PhD in Uppsala in 1892. He was appointed professor of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1905, succeeding Ivar Bendixson, and became professor of pure mathematics at Stockholm University College in 1911.

Von Koch wrote several papers on number theory. One of his results was a 1901 theorem proving that the Riemann hypothesis implies what is now known to be the strongest possible form of the prime number theorem.^[1]

He described the Koch curve in a 1904 paper entitled Sur une courbe continue sans tangente, obtenue par une construction géométrique élémentaire ("On a continuous curve without tangents constructible from elementary geometry").^[2]

He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900 in Paris with talk Sur la distribution des nombres premiers ("On the distribution of prime numbers")^[3] and in 1912 in Cambridge, England, with talk On regular and irregular solutions of some infinite systems of linear equations.^[4]

Notes

^ von Koch, Niels Helge (1901), "Sur la distribution des nombres premiers" [On the distribution of prime numbers], Acta Mathematica (in French), 24: 159–182, doi:10.1007/BF02403071, S2CID 119914826
^ von Koch, Helge (1904). "Sur une courbe continue sans tangente, obtenue par une construction géométrique élémentaire" [On a continuous curve without tangent, obtained by an elementary geometric construction]. Arkiv för Matematik (in French). 1: 681–704. JFM 35.0387.02.
^ "Sur la distribution des nombres premiers" [On the distribution of prime numbers]. Congrès Int. Math., Paris 1900. ICM proceedings. University of Toronto Press. 1902. pp. 195–8. JFM 32.0205.01.
^ "On regular and irregular solutions of some infinite systems of linear equations". Proc. 5. Intern. Math. Congr. ICM proceedings. Vol. 1. University of Toronto Press. 1913. pp. 352–365. JFM 44.0402.01.

References

Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval (1911). The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal. Vol. Mortimer–Percy. pp. 250–251.
Edgar, Gerald, ed. (1993). Classics on Fractals. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 9780201587012. contains an English translation of the paper 'On a continuous curve...'

External links

Works by or about Niels Fabian Helge von Koch at the Internet Archive
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Niels Fabian Helge von Koch", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
Niels Fabian Helge von Koch at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
von Koch family

v t e Fractals
Characteristics	Fractal dimensions Assouad Box-counting Higuchi Correlation Hausdorff Packing Topological Recursion Self-similarity
Iterated function system	Barnsley fern Cantor set Koch snowflake Menger sponge Sierpiński carpet Sierpiński triangle Apollonian gasket Fibonacci word Space-filling curve Blancmange curve De Rham curve Minkowski Dragon curve Hilbert curve Koch curve Lévy C curve Moore curve Peano curve Sierpiński curve Z-order curve String T-square n-flake Vicsek fractal Gosper curve Pythagoras tree Weierstrass function
Strange attractor	Multifractal system
L-system	Fractal canopy Space-filling curve H tree
Escape-time fractals	Burning Ship fractal Julia set Filled Newton fractal Douady rabbit Lyapunov fractal Mandelbrot set Misiurewicz point Multibrot set Newton fractal Tricorn Mandelbox Mandelbulb
Rendering techniques	Buddhabrot Orbit trap Pickover stalk
Random fractals	Brownian motion Brownian tree Brownian motor Fractal landscape Lévy flight Percolation theory Self-avoiding walk
People	Michael Barnsley Georg Cantor Bill Gosper Felix Hausdorff Desmond Paul Henry Gaston Julia Niels Fabian Helge von Koch Paul Lévy Aleksandr Lyapunov Benoit Mandelbrot Hamid Naderi Yeganeh Lewis Fry Richardson Wacław Sierpiński
Other	Coastline paradox Fractal art List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982 book) The Beauty of Fractals (1986 book) Chaos: Making a New Science (1987 book) Kaleidoscope Chaos theory

Authority control databases
International	ISNI VIAF WorldCat
National	Germany France BnF data Netherlands
Academics	Mathematics Genealogy Project zbMATH MathSciNet
People	Deutsche Biographie
Other	IdRef