Name Verena Huber-Dyson Role Mathematician | Books Lattices Over Orders | |
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Children Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Katarina Haefeli Similar People | ||
Verena Esther Huber-Dyson (May 6, 1923 – March 12, 2016) was a Swiss-American mathematician, known for work in group theory and formal logic. She has been described as a "brilliant mathematician", and has done research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on undecidability in group theory. At the time of her death she was emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta.
Contents
- Family and early life
- Children
- Career
- Academic affiliations prior to June 1968
- Academic Affiliations after September 1968
- Activities while at Calgary
- Non academic Employment
- Later life
- Books
- Articles
- References
Family and early life
Huber-Dyson was born Verena Esther Huber in Naples, Italy, on May 6, 1923. Her parents, Karl (Charles) Huber (1893-1946) and Berthy Ryffel (1899-1945), were Swiss nationals who raised Verena and her sister Adelheid ("Heidi", 1925-1987) in Athens, Greece, where the girls attended the German-speaking Deutsche Schule, or German School of Athens, until forced to return to Switzerland in 1940 by the war.
Charles Huber, who had managed the Middle Eastern operations of Bühler AG, a Swiss food-process engineering firm, began working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), monitoring the treatment of prisoners of war in internment camps. As the ICRC delegate to India and Ceylon, he was responsible for Italian prisoners held in British camps, but also visited German and Allied camps in Europe, and in 1945-46 served as an ICRC delegate to the United States, which he described to Verena as a place she "definitely ought to experience at length and in depth but just as definitely ought not to settle in."
She studied mathematics, with minors in physics and philosophy, at the University of Zurich, where she obtained her Ph.D in mathematics there in 1947 with a thesis in finite group theory. under the supervision of Andreas Speiser.
Children
Verena married Hans-Georg Haefeli, a fellow mathematician, in 1942, and was divorced in 1948. Her first daughter, Katarina Haefeli (now Halm), was born in 1945.
She subsequently married Freeman Dyson in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 11, 1950. They had two children together, Esther Dyson (born July 14, 1951, in Zurich) and George Dyson (born 1953, Ithaca, New York) and divorced in 1958.
Career
Huber-Dyson accepted a postdoctoral fellow appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1948, where she worked on group theory and formal logic. She also began teaching at Goucher College near Baltimore during this time.
She moved to California with her daughter Katarina, began teaching at San Jose State University in 1959, and then joined Alfred Tarski's Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Huber-Dyson taught at San Jose State University, the University of Zürich, University of Monash, as well as at UC Berkeley, Adelphi University, UCLA, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, in mathematics and in philosophy departments. She accepted a position in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary in 1973, becoming emerita in 1988.
Academic affiliations prior to June 1968
Academic Affiliations after September 1968
Activities while at Calgary
Non-academic Employment
Later life
After retiring from Calgary, Verena Huber-Dyson moved to South Pender Island in British Columbia, where she lived for 14 years. She died on March 12, 2016 in Bellingham, Washington, at the age of 92.