Wolfgang Haken (; June 21, 1928 – October 2, 2022) was a German American mathematician who specialized in topology, in particular 3-manifolds.
Biography Haken was born on June 21, 1928, in Berlin, Germany. His father was Werner Haken, a physicist who had Max Planck as a doctoral thesis advisor.Werner Haken, Beitrag zur Kenntnis der thermoelektrischen Eigenschaften der Metallegierungen. Accessed May 6, 2019 In 1953, Haken earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Kiel University) and married Anna-Irmgard von Bredow, who earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the same university in 1959. In 1962, they left Germany so he could accept a position as visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He became a full professor in 1965, retiring in 1998.
In 1976, together with colleague Kenneth Appel at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Haken proved the four-color theorem: they proved that any planar graph can be properly colored using at most four colors. Haken has introduced several ideas, including Haken manifolds, Kneser-Haken finiteness, and an expansion of the work of Kneser into a theory of normal surfaces. Much of his work has an algorithmic aspect, and he is a figure in algorithmic topology. One of his key contributions to this field is an algorithm to detect whether a knot is unknotted.
In 1978, Haken delivered an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki.International Congress of Mathematicians 1978 . International Mathematical Union. Accessed May 29, 2011 He was a recipient of the 1979 Fulkerson Prize of the American Mathematical Society for his proof with Appel of the four-color theorem.Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize , American Mathematical Society. Accessed May 29, 2011
Haken died in Champaign, Illinois, on October 2, 2022, aged 94.
Family
Haken's eldest son, Armin, proved that there exist propositional tautologies that require resolution proofs of exponential size.Avi Wigderson, Mathematics and Computation, March 27 2018, footnote at Theorem 6.11 Haken's eldest daughter, Dorothea Blostein, is a professor of computer science, known for her discovery of the master theorem for divide-and-conquer recurrences. Haken’s second son, Lippold, is the inventor of the Continuum Fingerboard. Haken’s youngest son, Rudolf, is a professor of music, who established the world's first Electric Strings university degree program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.University of Illinois Electric Strings Degree Program Accessed November 15, 2022 Wolfgang is the cousin of Hermann Haken, a physicist known for laser theory and synergetics. See also Unknotting problem
References
Haken, W. "Theorie der Normalflachen." Acta Math. 105, 245–375, 1961.
External links Wolfgang Haken memorial website
Haken's faculty page at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Wolfgang Haken biography from World of Mathematics Lippold Haken's life story