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Wolfgang Haken (born June 21, 1928) is a mathematician who specialized in topology, in particular 3- manifolds. He is best known as the co-solver of the four-color theorem, but has introduced several important ideas, including Haken manifolds, Kneser-Haken finiteness , and an expansion of the work of Kneser into a theory of normal surfaces . Much of his work has an algorithmic aspect, and he is one of the influential figures in algorithmic topology . One of his key contributions to this field is an algorithm to detect if a knot is unknotted.In 1976 together with colleague Kenneth Appel at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois, Haken solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color.
Haken, Wolfgang
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