Alfred Kempe

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with Alfred John Kempe.

Sir Alfred Kempe
Born(1849-07-07)7 July 1849
Kensington, London, England
Died21 April 1922(1922-04-21) (aged 72)
London, England
Known forKempe chain
Kempe's universality theorem
Sylvester-Kempe inversor
AwardsFellow of the Royal Society (1881)

Sir Alfred Bray Kempe

four colour theorem
.

Biography

Kempe was the son of the Rector of

University of Durham and he was elected a Bencher of the Inner Temple
in 1909.

In 1876 he published his article On a General Method of describing Plane Curves of the nth degree by Linkwork,

algebraic curves is now called Kempe's universality theorem.[3] While Kempe's proof was flawed, the first complete proof was provided in 2002, based on his ideas.[4][5]

The Sylvester–Kempe Inversor draws a straight line.

In 1877 Kempe discovered a new

Percy Heawood in 1890. Much later, his work led to fundamental concepts such as the Kempe chain
and unavoidable sets.

Kempe (1886) revealed a rather marked philosophical bent, and much influenced Charles Sanders Peirce. Kempe also discovered what are now called multisets, although this fact was not noted until long after his death.[7][8]

Kempe was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1881. He was Treasurer and vice-president of the Royal Society 1899–1919. He was a president of the London Mathematical Society from 1892 to 1894. He was also a mountain climber, mostly in Switzerland.

His first wife was Mary, daughter of Sir William Bowman, 1st Baronet; she died in 1893. He then married, in 1897, Ida, daughter of Judge Meadows White, QC. He had two sons and one daughter.

References

  1. ^ "Kempe, Alfred Bray (KM867AB)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  2. ^ A. B. Kempe, (1876) On a General Method of describing Plane Curves of the nth degree by Linkwork. Proceedings of the Royal Society.
  3. ^ A. Saxena (2011) Kempe’s Linkages and the Universality Theorem Archived 7 December 2016 at the Wayback Machine, RESONANCE
  4. ^ M. Kapovich and J. J. Millson (2002), Universality theorems for configguration spaces of planar linkages Topology, Pergamon Press.
  5. ISBN 978-0-521-71522-5
    .
  6. ^ A. B. Kempe (1877) How to draw a straight line; a lecture on linkages Archived 26 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine, London: Macmillan and Co.
  7. ^ A. B. Kempe, (1886) "A memoir on the theory of mathematical form," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 177: 1–70
  8. ^ Ivor Grattan-Guinness (2000) The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press

External links

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