Nicolaas Kuiper

Hendrik Nicolaas " Nico " Kuiper ( born June 28, 1920 in Rotterdam, † December 12, 1994 in Utrecht ) was a Dutch mathematician.

Kuiper studied from 1937 to 1941 at the University of Leiden, where in 1941 he published his first mathematical work. He received his Ph.D. in 1946 in classical differential geometry ( studies of line geometry) with Willem van der Woude at Leiden University. He was in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a guest stays in the USA at the University of Michigan at Raoul Bott ( where he met Stephen Smale ) and the Institute for Advanced Study ( where he worked with Shiing - Shen Chern ). After that, he was a professor at the College of Agriculture ( Landbouwhogeschool ) in Wageningen ( where he dealt with statistics for the design of breeding experiments ) and from 1962 professor of mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. 1971 to 1985 he was director of the IHES in Paris. After his retirement in 1985, he initially remained at the IHES, but moved in 1991 to the Netherlands.

1970 to 1974 he was on the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union. On IHES the library is named after him.

Kuiper dealt with many areas of mathematics, but in particular with differential geometry, differential topology and algebraic topology. He made important contributions to the theory of immersions (in the early 1960s, he led a taut immersions ) and the Nash embedding sets. For example, he proved the central role of the Veronese surface in immersions of two-dimensional surfaces in the Euclidean space fündimensionalen. He is known for a set of the topology of Hilbert spaces ( where he showed that the unit sphere is kontraktibel ) and for a test named after him in the statistics.

He was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He was a knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion and Knight of the French Legion of Honour. In 1984 he became an honorary doctorate from Brown University. In 1990 he was awarded the Gay - Lussac- Humboldt Prize.

His doctoral include Eduard Looijenga, Dirk and Floris Takens Siersma.