Martin Kneser

Martin Kneser (1928 to 2004) was a German mathematician who worked mainly on quadratic forms and algebraic groups. He came from a family of mathematicians: his father was Hellmuth Kneser and his grandfather Adolf Kneser. He earned his doctorate in 1950 at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a dissertation on the boundary of parallel bodies, under the supervision of Erhard Schmidt. In 1955 he studied the graphs that now bear his name, the Kneser graphs. He also gave a simplified proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm in 1962. Several results are named for him, among them the Kneser-Tits conjecture and the Kneser theorem in combinatorics.