Axel Thue (; 19 February 1863 – 7 March 1922) was a
Norwegian
Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to:
*Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe
* Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway
* Demographics of Norway
*The Norwegian language, including ...
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
, known for his original work in
diophantine approximation
In number theory, the study of Diophantine approximation deals with the approximation of real numbers by rational numbers. It is named after Diophantus of Alexandria.
The first problem was to know how well a real number can be approximated by r ...
and
combinatorics.
Work
Thue published his first important paper in 1909.
He stated in 1914 the so-called
word problem for semigroups or Thue problem, closely related to the
halting problem
In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a ...
.
[ Ronald V. Book and Friedrich Otto, ''String-rewriting Systems'', Springer, 1993, , p. 36.]
His only known PhD student was
Thoralf Skolem
Thoralf Albert Skolem (; 23 May 1887 – 23 March 1963) was a Norwegian mathematician who worked in mathematical logic and set theory.
Life
Although Skolem's father was a primary school teacher, most of his extended family were farmers. Skolem ...
.
The esoteric programming language
Thue is named after him.
Publications
*
*
See also
*
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References
External links
*
Axel Thue private archiveexists at NTNU University Librar
Dorabiblioteket
1863 births
1922 deaths
20th-century Norwegian mathematicians
Number theorists
People from Tønsberg
{{Europe-mathematician-stub