Kenneth Appel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Kenneth Ira Appel | |
| Born | October 8, 1932 |
|---|---|
| Residence | New Hampshire |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | Graph theory, Combinatorics |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of New Hampshire |
| Alma mater | B.S. - Queens College, City University of New York Doctor of Philosophy - University of Michigan |
| Doctoral advisor | Roger Lyndon |
| Known for | Proving the Four-color theorem with Wolfgang Haken |
| Notable awards | Fulkerson Prize [1979] |
Kenneth Ira Appel (born October 8, 1932) is a mathematician who in 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color.
The proof has been one of the most controversial of modern mathematics because of its heavy dependence on computer "number-crunching" to sort through possibilities. This work was the start of a sea-change in mathematicians' attitudes toward computers – which they had largely disdained as a tool for engineers rather than for theoreticians - leading to the creation of what is sometimes called "experimental mathematics."
Appel studied in Queens College and University of Michigan, followed by research in Institute for Defense Analysis in Princeton before he became a faculty member in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1961. From 1993 through 2002, Appel was head of the mathematics department at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire. Although retired now, he still works and occasionally teaches there and has an office on campus (in the new Kingsbury Hall.)
