Victor Klee
Victor Klee LaRue ( born September 18, 1925 in San Francisco; † August 17, 2007 in Lakewood, Ohio ) was an American mathematician.
Life
Klee studied mathematics and chemistry at Pomona College ( Bachelor 1945) and a doctorate in mathematics in 1949 at Edward McShane at the University of Virginia ( Convex sets in linear spaces ), where he was from 1947 Instructor and Assistant Professor from 1949 to 1953. From 1953 he was assistant professor, associate professor in 1954 and from 1957 professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. Since 1974, he was there at the same time adjunct professor of computer science and 1976-1984 Professor of Applied Mathematics. Since 1998 he has been Professor Emeritus. He was a visiting professor at the University of Western Australia ( 1979), the University of Colorado (1971 ), UCLA (1955 /56) and the University of Victoria (1975). In 1972 he was a consultant at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of IBM, 1966-1970 Advisor to the Rand Corporation, 1968 to 1972 by DuPont and 1963-1969 by Boeing. 1958 to 1960 he was at the University of Copenhagen ( as a Sloan Fellow and a Fellow of the National Research Council ) and in 1992 as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Trier. 1951/52, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Klee was 1980/81 Guggenheim Fellow ( at the University of Erlangen- Nuremberg) and 1956-1959 Sloan Fellow. In 1972 he was awarded the Lester Randolph Ford Award and 1980 and 1999, the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award from the Mathematical Association of America, which he was president from 1971 to 1973. In 1977 he received the Distinguished Service Award. He was on the Council of the SIAM ( 1966-1968 ) and the American Mathematical Society ( 1964-1966 and 1969-1971 ). In 1992 he received the Max Planck Research Award and 1980/81 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Klee was honorary doctorates from the universities of Trier ( 1995), Liege (1984 ) and the Pomona College ( 1965). In 1974 he was Invited Lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver (convex polyhedra and mathematical programming ) and 1962 in Stockholm (The generation of affine hulls ).
He was married and had three daughters.
Work
Clover dealt with many areas of mathematics such as functional analysis, theory of convexity, optimization theory, algorithms, theory, combinatorics, graph theory and geometry. In the 1960s, he made important contributions to the theory of convex polyhedra. He turned his investigations of convex polytopes on the linear programming and showed with George Minty (using Clover Minty - polytopes and clover - Minty cubes ) that the solution of some problems with the simplex method exponential computational complexity (instead of polynomially with the size of the problem to grow ) requires, although the method in practice usually arrives quickly to the destination. Klee showed (using special polyhedra, Kleetopen ) that in each dimension polyhedra without Hamiltonian paths ( all corners exactly once through ) exist.
From clover comes the problem of the minimum number of guards in a museum, modeled as a planar polygon with n sides ( Art Gallery theorem problem of museum guard ). Evidence of the suspected of clover minimum number ( the next smallest to n / 3 natural number ) come from Vasek Chvátal (1973) and Steve Fisk.
Klee also worked on the monograph by Branko Grünbaum, a colleague at the University of Washington, on convex polytopes. He has published over 245 scientific papers and had 36 graduate students ( including 34 in mathematics), including Bernd Sturmfels and Robert Phelps.
The American Mathematical Monthly, he oversaw many years a column about unsolved problems.
Writings
- Publisher: Convexity, University of Washington in 1961, American Mathematical Society 1963
- Publisher Richard Brualdi, Shmuel Friedland: Combinatorial and graph theoretical problems in linear algebra, Springer 1993
- What is a convex set? , American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 78, 1971, p 616 ( received the [ Lester Randolph Ford Award ] )