Arnold Emch

Arnold Frederick Emch (1871 to 1959) was a Swiss-American mathematician best known for his work on the inscribed square problem. He was born on 24 March 1871 at Hessigkofen in Switzerland and studied at ETH Zurich from 1890 to 1893 before travelling to America, where he took his doctorate at the University of Kansas in 1895 under Henry Byron Newson, with a dissertation on projective groups of perspective collineations in the plane treated synthetically. He was an assistant professor of graphic mathematics in the engineering school of the Kansas State Agricultural College until 1905, then a professor of mathematics at the Kantonsschule in Solothurn, Switzerland, and in 1908 he lectured at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rome. From 1911 to 1939 he was a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His publications deal with projective geometry, closed convex curves, algebraic surfaces and their models, and configurations of points and curves, and include a 1905 textbook introducing projective geometry and its applications.