Verena Huber-Dyson, American mathematician, Died at 92

Verena Esther Huber-Dyson was born on May 6, 1923, and died on March 12, 2016.

She was a Swiss-American mathematician,

She was known for work in group theory and formal logic.

Due to her level of work, Dyson has been described as a “brilliant mathematician”, and has done research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on undecidability in group theory.

Verena was emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta.

She grew up in Athens, but she studied mathematics, with minors in physics and philosophy, in Zurich.

Verena Huber-Dyson married Hans Haefeli, a fellow mathematician (1942).

They had a daughter together, Katarina, in 1945

She had earned her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1947 from the University of Zurich, studying with Andreas Speiser.

Verena Huber-Dyson moved with Hans and Katarina to the United States, divorcing Haefeli amicably in 1948.

She received a postdoctoral fellow appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where she worked on group theory and formal logic.

Verena Huber-Dyson also began teaching at Goucher College near Baltimore during this time.

After a short encounter with Abraham Pais, she eventually married Freeman Dyson in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 11, 1950.

The couple had two children together, Esther Dyson (born July 14, 1951, in Zurich) and George Dyson (born 1953, Ithaca, New York).

They divorced in 1958.

She then met Alfred Tarski at Cornell, in 1957.

At the time she was still intimately involved with Georg Kreisel, she moved to California with her daughter Katarina.

However, in 1959, Huber-Dyson started teaching at San Jose State University, then joined Tarski’s group at Berkeley in Logic and the Methodology of Science.

Alfred Tarski pursued her romantically and the two were involved until the early 1960s when she left the Bay Area.

She taught at San Jose State University, the University of Zürich, University of Monash, as well as at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, in mathematics and in philosophy departments.

Verena had accepted a position in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary in 1973, becoming emerita in 1988.

Verena Huber-Dyson passed away at 92 yrs old.