33 Facts About Klaus Roth

Klaus Friedrich Roth was a German-born British mathematician who won the Fields Medal for proving Roth's theorem on the Diophantine approximation of algebraic numbers.

Klaus Roth was a winner of the De Morgan Medal and the Sylvester Medal, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Klaus Roth taught at University College London until 1966, when he took a chair at Imperial College London.

Beyond his work on Diophantine approximation, Klaus Roth made major contributions to the theory of progression-free sets in arithmetic combinatorics and to the theory of irregularities of distribution.

Klaus Roth was known for his research on sums of powers, on the large sieve, on the Heilbronn triangle problem, and on square packing in a square.

Klaus Roth was a coauthor of the book Sequences on integer sequences.

Klaus Roth was born to a Jewish family in Breslau, Prussia, on 29 October 1925.

Klaus Roth's parents settled with him in London to escape Nazi persecution in 1933, and he was raised and educated in the UK.

Klaus Roth became a pupil at St Paul's School, London from 1939 to 1943, and with the rest of the school he was evacuated from London to Easthampstead Park during the Blitz.

Klaus Roth tried to join the Air Training Corps, but was blocked for some years for being German and then after that for lacking the coordination needed for a pilot.

Klaus Roth read mathematics at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and played first board for the Cambridge chess team, finishing in 1945.

Klaus Roth completed a master's degree there in 1948, and a doctorate in 1950.

Klaus Roth's dissertation was Proof that almost all Positive Integers are Sums of a Square, a Positive Cube and a Fourth Power.

On receiving his master's degree in 1948, Klaus Roth became an assistant lecturer at University College London, and in 1950 he was promoted to lecturer.

Klaus Roth took sabbaticals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, and seriously considered migrating to the United States.

Walter Hayman and Patrick Linstead countered this possibility, which they saw as a threat to British mathematics, with an offer of a chair in pure mathematics at Imperial College London, and Klaus Roth accepted the chair in 1966.

Klaus Roth retained this position until official retirement in 1988.

Klaus Roth remained at Imperial College as Visiting Professor until 1996.

Klaus Roth's lectures were usually very clear but could occasionally be erratic.

In 1955, Klaus Roth married Melek Khairy, who had attracted his attention when she was a student in his first lecture; Khairy was a daughter of Egyptian senator Khairy Pacha She came to work for the psychology department at University College London, where she published research on the effects of toxins on rats.

Khairy died in 2002, and Klaus Roth died in Inverness on 10 November 2015 at the age of 90.

Klaus Roth sent the Fields Medal with a smaller bequest to Peterhouse.

Klaus Roth was known as a problem-solver in mathematics, rather than as a theory-builder.

In 1955, Klaus Roth published what is known as Klaus Roth's theorem, completely settling this question.

Klaus Roth's theorem falsified the supposed connection between approximation exponent and degree, and proved that, in terms of the approximation exponent, the algebraic numbers are the least accurately approximated of any irrational numbers.

Klaus Roth vindicated Erdos and Turan by proving that it is not possible for the size of such a set to be proportional to : every dense set of integers contains a three-term arithmetic progression.

Klaus Roth measured this approximation by the squared difference between the number of points and times the area, and proved that for a randomly chosen rectangle the expected value of the squared difference is logarithmic in.

Klaus Roth had previously published a paper on this problem in 1965.

Klaus Roth eventually published four papers on this problem, the latest in 1976.

Klaus Roth made significant progress on square packing in a square.

In 1966, Heini Halberstam and Klaus Roth published their book Sequences, on integer sequences.

Klaus Roth won the Fields Medal in 1958 for his work on Diophantine approximation.

Klaus Roth was elected to the Royal Society in 1960, and later became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Fellow of University College London, Fellow of Imperial College London, and Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse.