Věra Trnková

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Věra Šedivá-Trnková (March 16, 1934 – 27 May 2018) was a Czech mathematician known for her work in topology and in category theory.[1][2]

Early life and education[edit]

Trnková was born on March 16, 1934, in Berehove, then in Czechoslovakia and now in Ukraine; her father was a forester. By the time she was in high school, her family lived in Prague, and she went to Charles University for study in mathematics. There, she worked with Miroslav Katětov on general topology, earning a master's degree in 1957 with the thesis Collectionwise normal and strongly paracompact spaces on strengthened definitions for normal spaces.[1]

She continued her work on topology at Charles University as a doctoral student of Eduard Čech, earning a candidate's degree (the Czech equivalent of a Ph.D.) in 1961 with the dissertation Non-F-Topologies.[1][3] Much later, in 1989, she was also given the Dr.Sc. degree, corresponding to a habilitation.[1]

Later life and career[edit]

In 1960, while still a student, Trnková became an assistant professor at Charles University. She was promoted to docent (associate professor), senior researcher, and full professor in 1967, 1986, and 1991, respectively.[1][4]

She retired in 1999,[4] and died on 27 May 2018.[2]

Research[edit]

Despite beginning her career working in general topology, Trnková shifted as early as 1962 to category theory. Her work in this area included the study of formal completions of categories, the embeddings of categories into categories of topological spaces, category-theoretic automata theory, and the isomorphism of product objects in categories.[1]

She became the author of over 100 research papers and two monographs:[1]

  • Combinatorial, algebraic and topological representations of groups, semigroups and categories (with Aleš Pultr, North-Holland Mathematical Library 22, North-Holland, 1980)[5]
  • Automata and algebras in categories (with Jiří Adámek, Mathematics and its Applications 37, Kluwer, 1990)[6]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Adámek, Jiří; Katětov, Miroslav (1994), "Věra Trnková's unbelievable 60", Mathematica Bohemica, 119 (2): 216–224, doi:10.21136/MB.1994.126082, hdl:10338.dmlcz/126082, MR 1293252
  2. ^ a b Kratochvíl, Jan (30 May 2018), Zemřela prof. Věra Trnková, Charles University, retrieved 2019-09-25
  3. ^ Věra Trnková at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ a b Curriculum vitae, archived from the original on 11 June 2008
  5. ^ Review of Combinatorial, algebraic and topological representations of groups, semigroups and categories by John R. Isbell, MR0563525. Isbell also published a longer review in Bull. AMS 1982, doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1982-14986-2
  6. ^ Review of Automata and algebras in categories by Walter Tholen, MR1071169

External links[edit]