Axel Thue (; 19 February 1863 – 7 March 1922) was a
Norwegian
Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to:
*Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe
* Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway
* Demographics of Norway
*The Norwegian language, including ...
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
, known for his original work in
diophantine approximation
In number theory, the study of Diophantine approximation deals with the approximation of real numbers by rational numbers. It is named after Diophantus of Alexandria.
The first problem was to know how well a real number can be approximated by r ...
and
combinatorics
Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many appl ...
.
Work
Thue published his first important paper in 1909.
He stated in 1914 the so-called
word problem for semigroups
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...
or Thue problem, closely related to the
halting problem
In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a g ...
.
Ronald V. Book
Ronald Vernon Book (March 5 1937 – May 28, 1997 in Santa Barbara, California) was a theoretical computer scientist. He published more than 150 papers in scientific journals.
His papers are of great impact for computational complexity theory
In ...
and Friedrich Otto, ''String-rewriting Systems'', Springer, 1993, , p. 36.
His only known PhD student was
Thoralf Skolem
Thoralf Albert Skolem (; 23 May 1887 – 23 March 1963) was a Norwegian mathematician who worked in mathematical logic and set theory.
Life
Although Skolem's father was a primary school teacher, most of his extended family were farmers. Skolem ...
.
The esoteric programming language
Thue is named after him.
Publications
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See also
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References
External links
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Axel Thue private archiveexists at NTNU University Librar
Dorabiblioteket
1863 births
1922 deaths
20th-century Norwegian mathematicians
Number theorists
People from Tønsberg
{{Europe-mathematician-stub