Poul Heegaard

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Poul Heegaard, ca. 1940

Pronunciation of "Heegaard" in Danish.

Poul Heegaard (November 2, 1871, Copenhagen - February 7, 1948, Oslo) was a Danish mathematician active in the field of topology. His 1898 thesis introduced a concept now called the Heegaard splitting of a 3-manifold. Heegaard's ideas allowed him to make a careful critique of work of Henri Poincaré. Poincaré had overlooked the possibility of the appearance of torsion in the homology groups of a space.

He later co-authored, with Max Dehn, a foundational article on combinatorial topology, in the form of an encyclopedia entry.

Heegaard studied mathematics at the University of Copenhagen, from 1889 to 1893 and following years of travelling, and teaching mathematics, he was appointed professor at University of Copenhagen in 1910.

Following a dispute with the faculty over, among other things, the hiring of Harald Bohr as professor at the University (Heegaard was against it)^{[citation needed]}; Heegaard accepted a professorship at Oslo in Norway, where he worked till his retirement in 1941.

External links

Heegaard, Poul (1898), Forstudier til en topologisk Teori for de algebraiske Fladers Sammenhang, Thesis (in Danish), JFM 29.0417.02
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Poul Heegaard", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews .
Poul Heegaard at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
"Heegaard home page"

Authority control	VIAF: 3225654 ISNI: 0000 0001 2098 6186 GND: 116564687 SUDOC: 083809422 MGP: 105157

Persondata
Name	Heegaard, Poul
Alternative names
Short description	Danish mathematician
Date of birth	November 2, 1871
Place of birth
Date of death	February 7, 1948
Place of death

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