Background
Verena Esther Huber was born in Naples on May 6, 1923, to Charles and Berthy Huber of Zurich, Switzerland.
Verena Esther Huber was born in Naples on May 6, 1923, to Charles and Berthy Huber of Zurich, Switzerland.
Growing up in Athens, she studied mathematics, with minors in physics and philosophy, in Zurich. Huber (then Haefeli) earned her Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics in 1947 from the University of Zurich, studying with Andreas Speiser.
She has been described as a "brilliant mathematician", and has done research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on undecidability in group theory. At the time of her death she was emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta. The couple had a daughter, Katarina, in 1945.
She moved with Hans and Katarina to the United States, divorcing Haefeli amicably in 1948.
Verena then accepted a postdoctoral fellow appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where she worked on group theory and formal logic. She also began teaching at Goucher College near Baltimore during this time.
In 1957, Huber-Dyson met Alfred Tarski at Cornell. In 1959 Huber-Dyson began teaching at San Jose State University, then joined Tarski"s group at Berkeley in Logic and the Methodology of Science.
Tarski pursued her romantically and the two were involved until the early 1960s, when she left the Bay Area.
Huber-Dyson taught at San Jose State University, the University of Zürich, University of Monash, as well as at University of California Berkeley and the University of Illinois, in mathematics and in philosophy departments. She accepted a position in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary in 1973, becoming emerita in 1988. She died on March 12, 2016 at the age of 92.