Niels Fabian Helge von Koch (25 January 1870 – 11 March 1924) was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

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 ...

who gave his name to the famous

fractal In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illu ...

known as the

Koch snowflake The Koch snowflake (also known as the Koch curve, Koch star, or Koch island) is a fractal curve and one of the earliest fractals to have been described. It is based on the Koch curve, which appeared in a 1904 paper titled "On a Continuous Curv ...

, one of the earliest fractal curves to be described. He was born to

Swedish nobility The Swedish nobility ( sv, Adeln eller Ridderskapet och Adeln) has historically been a legally and/or socially privileged class in Sweden, and part of the so-called ''frälse'' (a derivation from Old Swedish meaning ''free neck''). The archaic term ...

. His grandfather, Nils Samuel von Koch (1801–1881), was the

Chancellor of Justice The Chancellor of Justice is a government official found in some northern European countries, broadly responsible for supervising the lawfulness of government actions. History In 1713, the Swedish King Charles XII, preoccupied with fighting the ...

. His father, Richert Vogt von Koch (1838–1913) was a

Lieutenant-Colonel Lieutenant colonel ( , ) is a rank of commissioned officers in the armies, most marine forces and some air forces of the world, above a major and below a colonel. Several police forces in the United States use the rank of lieutenant colonel. ...

in the

Life Guards of Horse Life Guards of Horse ( sv, Livgardet till häst, K 1) was a Swedish Army cavalry regiment, first raised in 1770. It saw service for two centuries, before being amalgamated with the Life Regiment Dragoons (K 2) to form the Life Regiment of Horse (K ...

of the

Swedish Army The Swedish Army ( sv, svenska armén) is the land force of the Swedish Armed Forces. History Svea Life Guards dates back to the year 1521, when the men of Dalarna chose 16 young able men as body guards for the insurgent nobleman Gustav Vas ...

. He was enrolled at the newly created

Stockholm University College Stockholm University ( sv, Stockholms universitet) is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, soci ...

in 1887 (studying under

Gösta Mittag-Leffler Magnus Gustaf "Gösta" Mittag-Leffler (16 March 1846 – 7 July 1927) was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are connected chiefly with the theory of functions, which today is called complex analysis. Biography Mittag-Leffle ...

), and at

Uppsala University Uppsala University ( sv, Uppsala universitet) is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in opera ...

in 1888, where he also received his bachelor's degree (''filosofie kandidat'') since the non-governmental college in

Stockholm Stockholm () is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, largest city of Sweden as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people liv ...

had not yet received the rights to issue degrees. He received his Ph.D. in Uppsala in 1892. He was appointed professor of mathematics at the

Royal Institute of Technology The KTH Royal Institute of Technology ( sv, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, lit=Royal Institute of Technology), abbreviated KTH, is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH conducts research and education in engineering and technolo ...

in Stockholm in 1905, succeeding

Ivar Bendixson Ivar Otto Bendixson (1 August 1861 – 29 November 1935) was a Swedish mathematician. Biography Bendixson was born on 1 August 1861 at Villa Bergshyddan, Djurgården, Oscar Parish, Stockholm, Sweden, to a middle-class family. His father Vilhe ...

, and became professor of pure mathematics at Stockholm University College in 1911. Von Koch wrote several papers on

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic function, integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777� ...

. One of his results was a 1901 theorem proving that the

Riemann hypothesis In mathematics, the Riemann hypothesis is the conjecture that the Riemann zeta function has its zeros only at the negative even integers and complex numbers with real part . Many consider it to be the most important unsolved problem in ...

implies what is now known to be the strongest possible form of the

prime number theorem In mathematics, the prime number theorem (PNT) describes the asymptotic distribution of the prime numbers among the positive integers. It formalizes the intuitive idea that primes become less common as they become larger by precisely quantifying ...

. He described the

Koch curve The Koch snowflake (also known as the Koch curve, Koch star, or Koch island) is a fractal curve and one of the earliest fractals to have been described. It is based on the Koch curve, which appeared in a 1904 paper titled "On a Continuous Curv ...

in a 1904 paper entitled "On a continuous curve without tangents constructible from elementary geometry" (''original French title: "Sur une courbe continue sans tangente, obtenue par une construction géométrique élémentaire"''). He was an Invited Speaker of the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in 1900 in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

with talk ''Sur la distribution des nombres premiers'' and in 1912 in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, England with talk ''On regular and irregular solutions of some infinite systems of linear equations''.

Notes

References

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External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Koch, Helge von 1870 births 1924 deaths 19th-century Swedish mathematicians Stockholm University alumni Uppsala University alumni KTH Royal Institute of Technology faculty Stockholm University faculty Swedish nobility 20th-century Swedish mathematicians Number theorists Scientists from Stockholm Algebraists