Leo Moser

Leo Moser (1921 to 1970) was an Austrian-born Canadian mathematician who worked mainly in number theory and later in combinatorics and graph theory. Born in Vienna, he was taken to Canada as a child, grew up in Winnipeg and studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto before taking his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under Alfred Brauer. After a year at Texas Technical College he joined the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1951 and stayed there for the rest of his life. He published more than one hundred papers, many of them elementary problems and short notes in teaching journals, and was known for posing questions that others took up. His 1966 question about the smallest region that can hold every planar arc of length one became known as Moser's worm problem, and he co-authored the Lambek-Moser theorem on partitions of the natural numbers. Chronic heart disease marked his life and he died at the age of 48.