Gerhard Ringel (nonfiction)
Gerhard Ringel (October 28, 1919 in Kollnbrunn, Austria – June 24, 2008 in Santa Cruz, California) was a German mathematician who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in 1951. He was one of the pioneers in graph theory and contributed significantly to the proof of the Heawood conjecture (now the Ringel-Youngs theorem), a mathematical problem closely linked with the Four color theorem.
Biography
Although born in Kollnbrunn, Ringel was raised in Czechoslovakia and attended Charles University before being drafted into the German Army in 1940 (after Germany had taken control of much of what had been Czechoslovakia. After the war Ringel served for over four years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp.[citation needed]
Gerhard Ringel started his academic career as professor at the Free University Berlin. In 1970 he left Germany due to bureaucratic consequences of the German student movement, and continued his career at the University of California, Santa Cruz, having been invited there by his coauthor, Professor John W. T. (Ted) Youngs.
Ringel was awarded honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Karlsruhe (TH) and the Free University Berlin.
Besides his mathematical skills he was a widely acknowledged entomologist. His main emphasis lay on collecting and breeding butterflies. Prior to his death, he gave his outstanding collection of butterflies to the UCSC Museum of Natural History Collections.
Remembered by colleagues
To: Department of Mathematics
From: Richard Montgomery, Chair
June 30, 2008
It is with sadness that I inform you of the death of Professor Gerhard Ringel. Gerhard came to UCSC as Professor in 1970. He was one of the world leaders in the fields of Combinatorics and Graph Theory and was much honored for his seminal work including the solution (with J.W.T. Youngs) of the famous Heawood Conjecture in genus p greater than one. This conjecture gave a formula for the minimum number of colors H(p) needed to color a map on a surface of genus p, namely
H(p) = [ 1/2( 7 + √( 48p + 1)) ]
The only exceptions in their proof were the sphere, plane, and Klein bottle.
He was awarded two honorary degrees, one from Karlsruhe and the other from Berlin, and served on several distinguished editorial boards. In 1988, he was honored by the Santa Cruz Division of the Academic Senate by his selection as Faculty Research Lecturer.
Gerhard served as our Chair for thirteen years and was admired and liked by his colleagues. A memorial service is being planned for the Fall.
https://news.ucsc.edu/2008/06/2314.html
In the News
Fiction cross-reference
Nonfiction cross-reference
- Four color theorem (nonfiction)
- Graph theory (nonfiction)
- Heawood conjecture (nonfiction)
- Klein bottle (nonfiction)
- Mathematician (nonfiction)
- Mathematics (nonfiction)
- John William Theodore Youngs (nonfiction)
External links:
- Gerhard Ringel @ Wikipedia
- Pearl in Graph Theory Nora Hartsfield and Gerhard Ringel
- Gerhard Ringel, professor emeritus of mathematics, dies at age 88 @ UCSC