Verena Huber-Dyson

Verena Esther Huber-Dyson (born Naples, May 6, 1923) is a Swiss-American mathematician, known for work in group theory and formal logic.[1] She has been described as a "brilliant mathematician",[1] and has done research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on "undecidability" in group theory. She is currently emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta.

Life and work

Verena Esther Huber was born in Naples on May 6, 1923, to Charles and Berthy Huber of Zurich, Switzerland.[2] Growing up in Athens, she studied mathematics, with minors in physics and philosophy, in Zurich. In 1942, at nineteen, she married Hans Haefeli, a fellow mathematician.[3] The couple had a daughter, Katarina, in 1945.[3][4]

Huber (then Haefeli) earned her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1947 from the University of Zurich, studying with Andreas Speiser.[5][6]

She then moved, with Hans and Katarina, to the United States,[7] divorcing amicably with Haefeli in 1948.[3]

Verena then accepted a postdoctoral fellow appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University,[8] where she worked on group theory and formal logic.[3][4] She also began teaching at Goucher College near Baltimore during this time.[2]

After a brief involvement with Abraham Pais, she married Freeman Dyson in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 11, 1950,[6] after getting engaged only three weeks after the couple met.[1] They had two children together, Esther Dyson (born July 14, 1951, in Zurich) and George Dyson (born 1953, Ithaca, New York)[1][6] and divorced in 1958.[4][9]

In 1957, she met Alfred Tarski at Cornell.[4] While briefly romantically involved with Georg Kreisel, Verena and her daughter Katarina moved to California with him.[4] In 1959 she began teaching at San Jose State University, then accepted a position at Berkeley, working with Tarski, joining his group at Berkeley in Logic and the Methodology of Science.[4][10] He pursued her romantically and the two were involved until the early 1960s, when she left the Bay Area.[4]

She has taught at San Jose State University, the University of Zürich, University of Monash, as well as at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, in mathematics and in philosophy departments. She accepted a position in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, becoming emerita in 1988.[11]

Publications

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 Nicholas Dawidoff, "The Civil Heretic", New York Times, March 29, 2009.
  2. 1 2 Schewe, p.72.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Schewe, p.70.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic, pp. 272–276.
  5. ↑ Ein Dualismus als Klassifikationsprinzip in der abstrakten Gruppentheorie (dissertation).
  6. 1 2 3 John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson, Freeman Dyson, The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St. Andrews Scotland (last visited March 14, 2014).
  7. ↑ George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (2012)
  8. ↑ Directory, A Community of Scholars: Institute for Advanced Study, Institute for Advanced Study (last visited March 14, 2014).
  9. ↑ See generally Phillip F. Schewe, Maverick Genius: The Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson, Chapters 5–8.
  10. ↑ Verena Huber-Dyson, "Gödel in a Nutshell", Edge, May 13, 2006.
  11. ↑ Schewe, p.287.

References

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