Edmund Hlawka

Edmund Hlawka, born on 5 November 1916 in Bruck an der Mur in Styria and died on 19 February 2009 in Vienna, was an Austrian mathematician and a leading number theorist. He studied at the University of Vienna from 1934 and gained his doctorate in 1938 under Nikolaus Hofreiter. He did most of his work at the Vienna University of Technology and was a visiting professor at Princeton University and the Sorbonne. His doctoral students included Rainer Burkard, Gert Sabidussi, Wolfgang M. Schmidt, Walter Knodel and Hermann Maurer, and through these and other students he has more than three thousand academic descendants. The Minkowski-Hlawka theorem and the Koksma-Hlawka inequality carry his name, as does the asteroid 10763 Hlawka. His honors include the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 1963, the City of Vienna Prize for the Humanities in 1969, the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1982 and the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold with Star in 2007.