Anton Kotzig

Anton Kotzig (1919 to 1991) was a Slovak and Canadian mathematician who worked in combinatorics, graph theory and mathematical statistics. Born in the village of Kočovce in western Slovakia, he took his doctorate in mathematical statistics at Comenius University in Bratislava in 1943, spent years applying mathematics to social insurance and economic planning, and served as rector of the University of Economics in Bratislava from 1952 to 1958. He then headed the newly created Mathematical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and established what is known as the Slovak School of Graph Theory. In 1969 he moved to Canada, and from 1970 he worked at the Centre de recherches mathematiques and the University of Montreal until his death. His name is attached to Kotzig's theorem on the degrees of edge endpoints in polyhedral graphs, to the Kotzig transformation, and, with Gerhard Ringel, to the still unsolved Ringel-Kotzig conjecture that every tree has a graceful labeling.