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 curve, 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 1906 paper entitled "Une méthode géométrique élémentaire pour l'étude de certaines questions de la théorie des courbes plane" [1].

Reference

• The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal (Mortimer-Percy Volume) by the Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval (1911), pages 250 - 251

External link

• [1] A biography page of Niels Fabian Helge von Koch from the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive at the University of St Andrews