Victor Klee

Who was Victor Klee?

Victor L. Klee, Jr. was a mathematician specialising in convex sets, functional analysis, analysis of algorithms, optimization, and combinatorics. He spent almost his entire career at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Born in San Francisco, Vic Klee earned his B.A. degree in 1945 with high honors from Pomona College, majoring in mathematics and chemistry. He did his graduate studies, including a thesis on Convex Sets in Linear Spaces, and received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1949. After teaching several years at the University of Virginia, he moved in 1953 to the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, where he was a faculty member for 54 years. Klee wrote more than 240 research papers. He proposed Klee's measure problem and the Art gallery theorem, and Kleetopes are also named after him. Klee served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 1971 to 1973.