Helge von Koch

Niels Fabian Helge von Koch (25 January 1870 to 11 March 1924) was a Swedish mathematician who gave his name to the famous fractal known as the Koch snowflake, one of the earliest fractal curves to be described. He was born to Swedish nobility, his grandfather Nils Samuel von Koch having been Chancellor of Justice and his father Richert Vogt von Koch a lieutenant-colonel in the Life Guards of Horse. He enrolled at the newly created Stockholm University College in 1887, studying under Gösta Mittag-Leffler, and at Uppsala University in 1888, receiving his PhD in Uppsala in 1892. He became professor of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1905, succeeding Ivar Bendixson.