Otakar Borůvka

Otakar Borůvka ( born May 10, 1899 in Uherský Ostroh, Moravia, † July 22, 1995 in Brno, Czech Republic) was a Czech mathematician who is best known for his contributions to graph theory today, which he had long before the establishment of graph theory published as a mathematical discipline.

Life

Borůvka attended the comprehensive school in Uherské Hradiště before moving in 1916 to the military school in Hranice na Moravě and later enrolled at the military technical academy in Lower Austria Mödling near Vienna. After the end of World War II, he graduated in 1918 at the comprehensive school in Uherské Hradiště.

In its release O jistém problému minimálním ( German for over a certain minimization problem ) from 1926, Borůvka described an algorithm for computing a minimum spanning tree of an electronic network, which is now named after him (algorithm of Borůvka ). Much of his results in this context was quasi later discovered in theoretical computer science, which also is interested in the problem of minimum spanning trees, again; see algorithm of Prim and Kruskal algorithm.

Works

• Basics of groupoid and group theory. German Academic Publishers, Berlin 1960.