Egbert van Kampen

Egbert Rudolf van Kampen ( born May 28, 1908 in Berchem, Antwerp, Belgium, † February 11, 1942 in Baltimore, United States) was a Dutch mathematician, nor for work in algebraic topology (for example, duality theorems ) is known today.

Life

Van Kampen was born as the son of a Dutch bookkeeper when he worked in Belgium. Van Kampen went to school in The Hague, where he noticed through 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 Pavel Alexandrov who were interested in him for topology. In 1929 he was in Leiden at Willem van der Woude PhD ( The combinatorial topology and duality theorems ). In 1928 he was in Hamburg with Emil Artin, which led to his first release, in which he refuted a conjecture of Artin from the knot theory by a counterexample. In 1930 he became the assistant of Jan Schouten in Delft, with whom he has published over whose specialty tensor. In 1931 he went to the USA and became an assistant at Johns Hopkins University, where he met Oscar Zariski what the Zariski - van Kampen theorem on the group-theoretical representation was reflected ( by generators and relations ) of the fundamental group of the complement of an algebraic curve. In 1933 he published a work to which contained the set of van Kampen (also set of Seifert -van Kampen - called ) on the calculation of the fundamental group of topological spaces of the fundamental groups of ( path-connected ) subspaces that cover. From 1933 he was (now called among others, John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he focused on duality theorems of algebraic topology, the recently Lev Pontryagin proved for the special case of compact abelian groups therefore Pontryagin - van Kampen duality ). The collaboration with von Neumann and the acquaintance with Aurel Wintner at Johns Hopkins University conducted in 1937 to work on almost periodic functions. He also collaborated with Mark Kac and Paul Erdős. In the late 1930s he was diagnosed with cancer. He was repeatedly operated on, but died from the disease beginning in 1942.