Nicolaas Kuiper

Who was Nicolaas Kuiper?

Nicolaas Hendrik "Nico" Kuiper was a Dutch mathematician, known for Kuiper's test and proving Kuiper's theorem. He also contributed to the Nash embedding theorem.

Kuiper completed his Ph.D. in differential geometry from the University of Leiden in 1946 under the supervision of Willem van der Woude. He then came to the United States, first at the University of Michigan where he met Raoul Bott and his student Steve Smale, and then at the Institute for Advanced Study for a crucial interaction with Shiing-Shen Chern. He was later appointed professor of pure mathematics at the University of Amsterdam.

He served as director of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques from 1971 until his retirement 1985. After his retirement, he remained in France until 1991, when he returned to live in the Netherlands. He continued to participate in mathematical colloquia at the University of Utrecht.