Edouard Zeckendorf

Edouard Zeckendorf (1901 to 1983) was a Belgian physician, army officer and amateur mathematician, born in Liège. He qualified as a medical doctor at the University of Liège in 1925, joined the Belgian army medical corps and later added dental surgery to his qualifications. Taken prisoner after the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, he remained a prisoner of war until 1945 and gave medical care to fellow allied prisoners. He retired from the army in 1957 with the rank of colonel. His mathematical publishing began after the war: he wrote more than thirty papers on Fibonacci numbers, many of them in the Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège. He is best known for the result now called Zeckendorf's theorem, which he found in 1939 and proved, stating that every positive whole number can be written as a sum of distinct non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers and that the representation is unique. The Société Royale des Sciences de Liège elected him an associate member in 1957.