Vojtěch Jarník

Vojtěch Jarník (1897 to 1970) was a Czech mathematician who worked in number theory, mathematical analysis and graph algorithms. Born in Prague, he studied at Charles University, took his doctorate in 1921 with a thesis on the roots of Bessel functions, and twice worked with Edmund Landau in Göttingen. He became a professor of mathematics at Charles University in 1935, kept the chair until he retired in 1968, and helped found the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. About sixty of his ninety papers concern number theory, notably lattice points in convex bodies, a topic tied to the Gauss circle problem, and Diophantine approximation, including its link to Hausdorff dimension. He also studied nowhere differentiable functions, showing that Bolzano's function is the oldest known continuous example, and in 1930 gave a simpler solution of the minimal spanning tree problem, which gives Jarník's algorithm its name.