Włodzimierz Kuperberg is a professor of mathematics at Auburn University, with research interests in geometry and topology.
Background
Although Kuperberg is Polish-American, he was born in what is now Belarus, where his parents and older siblings had traveled east to escape World World War World War II In 1946, the family returned to Poland, resettling in Szczecin, where Kuperberg grew up.
Education
He began his studies at the University of Warsaw in 1959, and received his Doctor of Philosophy from the same institution in 1969, under the supervision of Karol Borsuk.
Career
During his time at Warsaw, he published three high school textbooks in Polish. Kuperberg left Poland due to the anti-semitic aspects of the 1967-1968 Polish political crisis, and worked at Stockholm University until 1972, when he assumed a visiting position at the University of Houston. In 1974, Kuperberg took a position at Auburn where he remains.
Although much of Kuperberg"s early mathematical work is in topology, he is best known today for his work in geometry, and in particular on packing and covering problems.
His first paper in this area (1982) showed that the ratio of packing density to covering density of any convex body in the plane is at least 3/4.