Verena Huber-Dyson

Verena Huber-Dyson
File:Verena Huber-Dyson (cropped).jpg
Born	(1923-05-06)May 6, 1923 Naples, Italy
Died	Bellingham, Washington
Other names	Verena Huber, Verena Haefeli
Residence	Switzerland, United States, Canada
Citizenship	Swiss, United States, Canada
Fields	logic, algebra
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley Adelphi University UCLA University of Illinois University of Calgary
Alma mater	University of Zurich
Thesis	Ein Dualismus als Klassifikationsprinzip in der abstrakten Gruppentheorie (1947)
Doctoral advisor	Andreas Speiser
Spouses	Hans-Georg Haefeli Freeman Dyson
Children	Katarina Halm Esther Dyson George Dyson

Verena Esther Huber-Dyson (May 6, 1923 – March 12, 2016) was a Swiss-American mathematician, known for work in group theory and formal logic. She has been described as a "brilliant mathematician", and has done research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on undecidability in group theory. At the time of her death she was emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta.

Life and Career

Family and Early Life

Huber-Dyson was born Verena Esther Huber in Naples, Italy, on May 6, 1923. Her parents, Karl (Charles) Huber (1893-1946) and Berthy Ryffel (1899-1945), were Swiss nationals who raised Verena and her sister Adelheid ("Heidi", 1925-1987) in Athens, greece, where the girls attended the German-speaking Deutsche Schule, or German School of Athens, until forced to return to Switzerland in 1940 by the war.

Charles Huber, who had managed the Middle Eastern operations of Bühler AG, a Swiss food-process engineering firm, began working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), monitoring the treatment of prisoners of war in internment camps. As the ICRC delegate to India and Ceylon, he was responsible for Italian prisoners held in British camps, but also visited German and Allied camps in Europe, and in 1945-46 served as an ICRC delegate to the United States, which he described to Verena as a place she "definitely ought to experience at length and in depth but just as definitely ought not to settle in."

She studied mathematics, with minors in physics and philosophy, at the University of Zurich, where she obtained her Ph.D in mathematics there in 1947 with a thesis in finite group theory. under the supervision of Andreas Speiser.

Children

Verena married Hans-Georg Haefeli, a fellow mathematician, in 1942, and was divorced in 1948. Her first daughter, Katarina Haefeli (now Halm), was born in 1945.

She subsequently married Freeman Dyson in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 11, 1950. They had two children together, Esther Dyson (born July 14, 1951, in Zurich) and George Dyson (born 1953, Ithaca, New York) and divorced in 1958.

Career

Huber-Dyson accepted a postdoctoral fellow appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1948, where she worked on group theory and formal logic. She also began teaching at Goucher College near Baltimore during this time.

She moved to California with her daughter Katarina, began teaching at San Jose State University in 1959, and then joined Alfred Tarski's Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Huber-Dyson taught at San Jose State University, the University of Zürich, University of Monash, as well as at UC Berkeley, Adelphi University, UCLA, and the University of Illinois, in mathematics and in philosophy departments. She accepted a position in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary in 1973, becoming emerita in 1988.

Academic affiliations (non-tenure)

• Cornell University
• Goucher College
• San Jose State University
• Adelphi University
• UCLA
• University of London
• ETH Zürich
• Warwick University
• University of Melbourne
• Monash University
• Australian National University in Canberra
• University of Zürich
• Mills College
• UC Berkeley

Academic affiliations (tenure)

• Associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois (1972)
• Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary (1973-1988)
  • Taught graduate courses on foundations of mathematics and the philosophy and methodology of the sciences
  • Began work on the monograph, Gödel's theorems: a workbook on formalization (published by Teubner in 1991)

Non-academic

• Consultant for Remington Rand (Univac) in Philadelphia
• Consultant for Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles

Later Life

Verena Huber-Dyson died on March 12, 2016 in Bellingham, Washington, at the age of 92.

References

• Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (2004)
• Phillip F. Schewe, Maverick Genius: The Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson (2013) (especially Chapters 5–8).