Věra Šedivá-Trnková (March 16,ěraTrnková 1934 – 27 May 2018) was a Czech mathematician known for her work in topology and in category theory.

Early life and education

Trnková was born on March 16, 1934, in Berehove, then in Czechoslovakia and now in Ukraine; her father was a forester. By the time she was in high school, her family lived in Prague, and she went to Charles University for study in mathematics. There, she worked with Miroslav Katětov on general topology, earning a master's degree in 1957 with the thesis Collectionwise normal and strongly paracompact spaces on strengthened definitions for normal spaces.

Věra Trnková

She continued her work on topology at Charles University as a doctoral student of Eduard Čech, earning a candidate's degree (the Czech equivalent of a Ph.D.) in 1961 with the dissertation Non-F-Topologies. Much later, in 1989, she was also given the Dr.Sc. degree, corresponding to a habilitation.

Věra Trnková

Later life and career

In 1960, while still a student, Trnková became an assistant professor at Charles University. She was promoted to docent (associate professor), senior researcher, and full professor in 1967, 1986, and 1991, respectively.

Věra Trnková

She retired in 1999, and died on 27 May 2018.

Research

Despite beginning her career working in general topology, Trnková shifted as early as 1962 to category theory. Her work in this area included studied of formal completions of categories, the embeddings of categories into categories of topological spaces, category-theoretic automata theory, and the isomorphism of product objects in categories.

She became the author of over 100 research papers and two monographs: Combinatorial, algebraic and topological representations of groups, semigroups and categories (with Aleš Pultr, North-Holland Mathematical Library 22, North-Holland, 1980) Automata and algebras in categories (with Jiří Adámek, Mathematics and its Applications 37, Kluwer, 1990)

References

External links

Home page (archived 26 March 2015) Věra Trnková on nLab

1934 births

2018 deaths

Czech mathematicians

Women mathematicians

Charles University alumni

Academic staff of Charles University

Topologists

Category theorists