Helge von Koch

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, which was one of the earliest fractal curves to have been 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").

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...".

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