nLab Kazimierz Kuratowski

Kazimierz Kuratowski (b. February 2, 1896, d. June 18, 1980) was a Polish mathematician who worked primarily in general topology and mathematical logic.

He is probably best known for a celebrated theorem in graph theory: that a graph $G$ is planar iff neither the complete graph $K_5$ on $5$ vertices nor the complete bipartite graph $K_{3, 3}$ on a pair of $3$-element sets appear as edge subdivisions of subgraphs of $G$ (closely related to Wagner’s theorem that this is the case iff neither $K_5$ nor $K_{3, 3}$ appear as graph minors of $G$).

References

• C. Kuratowski, Sur la notion d’ensemble fini , Fund. Math. I (1920) pp.130-131. (pdf)

• C. Kuratowski, Sur l’opération $\bar{A}$ de l’analysis situs , Fund. Math. III (1922) pp.192-195. (pdf)

• Casimir Kuratowski (1930), “Sur le problème des courbes gauches en Topologie”, Fundamenta Mathematicae, 15 (1):271-283. (eudml)

category: people

Last revised on June 7, 2017 at 05:27:35. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.