Otakar Borůvka (10 May 1899 in Uherský Ostroh – 22 July 1995 in Brno) was a Czech mathematician best known today for his work in graph theory, long before this was an established mathematical discipline.
He was born in Uherský Ostroh, a town in Moravia (then in Austria-Hungary, later Czechoslovakia; today Czech Republic), and he attended the grammar school in Uherské Hradiště, before changing in 1916 to the military school in Hranice and later enrolling into the military technical academy in Mödling near Vienna. After the end of World War I, he graduated in 1918 back at the grammar school in Uherské Hradiště.
In his 1926 paper O jistém problému minimálním (English On a certain minimal problem), Borůvka described an algorithm for finding the minimum spanning tree of an electrical network, now called Borůvka's algorithm. His results were later discovered by the theoretical computer science community.
External links
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Otakar Borůvka", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
Otakar Borůvka at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
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