Biography:Verena Huber-Dyson

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Short description: Swiss-American mathematician (1923–2016)
Verena Huber-Dyson
Verena Huber-Dyson (cropped).jpg
Born
Verena Esther Huber

Naples, Italy
DiedMarch 12, 2016(2016-03-12) (aged 92)[1]
Bellingham, Washington
Other namesVerena Huber, Verena Haefeli
Citizenship
  • Switzerland
  • United States
EducationUniversity of Zürich
Known for
Spouse(s)
Children
Scientific career
FieldsLogic, algebra
Institutions
ThesisEin Dualismus als Klassifikationsprinzip in der abstrakten Gruppentheorie (1947)
Doctoral advisorAndreas Speiser

Verena Esther Huber-Dyson (May 6, 1923 – March 12, 2016) was a Swiss-American mathematician, known for her work on group theory and formal logic.[1][2] She has been described as a "brilliant mathematician",[2] who did research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on undecidability in group theory. At the time of her death, she was emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta.

Biography

Early life and education

Huber-Dyson was born Verena Esther Huber in Naples, Italy, on May 6, 1923. Her parents, Karl (Charles) Huber (1893–1946) and Berthy Ryffel (1899–1945), were Swiss nationals[3] who raised Verena and her sister Adelheid ("Heidi", 1925–1987) in Athens, Greece, where the girls attended the German-speaking Deutsche Schule, or German School of Athens, until forced to return to Switzerland in 1940 by the war.

Charles Huber, who had managed the Middle Eastern operations of Bühler AG, a Swiss food-process engineering firm, began working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), monitoring the treatment of prisoners of war in internment camps. As the ICRC delegate to India and Ceylon, he was responsible for Italian prisoners held in British camps, but also visited German and Allied camps in Europe. In 1945-46 he served as an ICRC delegate to the United States, which he described to Verena as a place she "definitely ought to experience at length and in depth but just as definitely ought not to settle in."[1]

She studied mathematics, with minors in physics and philosophy, at the University of Zurich, where she obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1947 with a thesis in finite group theory[4][5][6] under the supervision of Andreas Speiser.

Career

Huber-Dyson accepted a postdoctoral fellow appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1948,[7] where she worked on group theory and formal logic.[8][9] She also began teaching at Goucher College near Baltimore during this time.[9]

She moved to California with her daughter Katarina, began teaching at San Jose State University in 1959, and then joined Alfred Tarski's Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.[8][10]

Huber-Dyson taught at San Jose State University, the University of Zürich, Monash University, as well as at University of California, Berkeley, Adelphi University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, in mathematics and in philosophy departments. She accepted a position in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary in 1973, becoming emerita in 1988.[11]

Academic affiliations prior to June 1968

Self-portrait
Self-portrait, 1954[12]

Academic affiliations after September 1968

  • Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Chicago (September 1968 – June 1971) tenure-track Assistant Professor
  • Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary (September 1971 –June 1972) nontenure-track
  • Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Chicago (September 1972 – June 1973) tenured Associate Professor
  • Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary (September 1973 – June 1975) tenure-track Assistant Professor
  • Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary (September 1977 – June 1981) tenured Associate Professor.
  • Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary (September 1981 – June 1988) Full Professor
  • Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary (September 1988 – March 2016) Emerita Professor

Activities while at Calgary

  • Taught graduate courses on foundations of mathematics and the philosophy and methodology of the sciences
  • Began work on the monograph, Gödel's theorems: a workbook on formalization[13]

Non-academic employment

  • Consultant for Remington Rand (Univac) in Philadelphia
  • Consultant for Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles

Later life

External image
Verena Huber-Dyson
Later life,[14]

After retiring from Calgary, Verena Huber-Dyson moved back to South Pender Island in British Columbia, where she lived for 14 years.[15][16] She died on March 12, 2016, in Bellingham, Washington, at the age of 92.[1][12]

Personal life

External image
Verena Huber-Dyson
New Jersey, 1949,[12]

Verena married Hans-Georg Haefeli, a fellow mathematician, in 1942, and was divorced in 1948. Her first daughter, Katarina Halm (née Halm), was born in 1945.[3][8]

She subsequently married Freeman Dyson in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 11, 1950.[5] They had two children together, Esther Dyson (born July 14, 1951, in Zurich) and George Dyson (born 1953, Ithaca, New York),[2][5] and divorced in 1958.[8]

Selected publications

"There is more to truth than can be caught by proof".

Monographs

  • Haefeli-Huber, Verena Esther (1948). Ein Dualismus als Klassifikationsprinzip in der abstrakten Gruppentheorie [A dualism as a classification principle in abstract group theory] (PhD) (in Deutsch). Zurich University. OCLC 2277810.
  • Roggenkamp, Klaus W.; Huber-Dyson, Verena (1970). Lattices over Orders I. Lecture Notes in Mathematics (No 115). Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/BFb0068796. ISBN 978-3-540-04904-3. 
  • Huber-Dyson, Verena (1991). Gödel's theorems: a workbook on formalization. 122 in Teubner-Texte zur Mathematik. B.G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft. ISBN 978-3-8154-2023-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=8eDuAAAAMAAJ. 

Articles

External image
Verena Huber-Dyson
July 28, 2006[17]

References

Notes

Citations

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "Obituary of Verena Huber-Dyson". 12 March 2016. https://www.molesfarewelltributes.com/obituaries/verena-huber-dyson/. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Dawidoff 2009.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Schewe 2013, p. 52.
  4. ↑ Haefeli-Huber 1948.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Freeman Dyson", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Dyson.html .
  6. ↑ Verena Huber-Dyson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  7. ↑ "A Community of Scholars". http://www.ias.edu/people/cos/users/vhaefeli01. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Feferman & Feferman 2004, pp. 272-276.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Schewe 2013, p. 72.
  10. ↑ Huber-Dyson 2006.
  11. ↑ Schewe 2013.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Brockman 2016.
  13. ↑ Huber-Dyson 1991.
  14. ↑ Sherman 2009.
  15. ↑ Huber-Dyson 1996a, p. 653.
  16. ↑ Brooks 2002, p. 20.
  17. ↑ Verena Huber-Dyson on Flickr

Sources



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