Helge von Koch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Niels Fabian Helge von Koch (January 25, 1870 – March 11, 1924) was a Swedish mathematician who gave his name to the famous fractal known as the Koch snowflake, one of the earliest fractal curves to be described.
He was born into a family of Swedish nobility. His grandfather, Nils Samuel von Koch (1801–1881), was the Attorney-General ("Justitiekansler") of Sweden. His father, Richert Vogt von Koch (1838–1913) was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Horse Guards of Sweden.
von Koch wrote several papers on number theory. One of his results was a 1901 theorem proving that the Riemann hypothesis is equivalent to a strengthened form of the prime number theorem.
He described the Koch curve 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").
[edit] References
- The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal (Mortimer-Percy Volume) by the Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval (1911), pages 250 - 251
- Classics on Fractals, Gerald Edgar, ed. (Addison-Wesley, 1993) contains an English translation of the paper "On a continuous curve...".
