Otakar Borůvka

Otakar Borůvka (10 May 1899 – 22 July 1995) was a Czech mathematician. He is best known for his work in graph theory.

Education and career Borůvka was born in Uherský Ostroh, a town in Moravia, Austria-Hungary (today in the Czech Republic), the son of a school headmaster. In 1916, influenced by the ongoing World War I, he moved to the military school (Realschule) in Hranice, and later he enrolled into the Imperial and Royal Technical Military Academy in Mödling near Vienna.

At Čech's suggestion, Borůvka visited Élie Cartan in Paris from 1926 to 1927. Borůvka solved this problem by modeling it mathematically as a minimum spanning tree problem, and described the first known algorithm for finding the minimum spanning tree of a metric space (the set of cities to be connected by the network, together with their distances). The same algorithm has been rediscovered repeatedly. It is more suitable for distributed and parallel computation than many other minimum spanning tree algorithms, can achieve linear time complexity on planar graphs and more generally in minor-closed graph families, and plays a central role in the randomized linear time algorithm of .

From 1924 to 1935, Borůvka's primary interest was in differential geometry. His work in this area concerned analytic correspondences between projective planes, normal curvature of high-dimensional surfaces, and Frenet formula for curves in high-dimensional spaces.

He has also been given medals by the Free University of Brussels, the University of Liège, Jagiellonian University, Comenius University, Palacký University of Olomouc, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin, the Russian Academy of Sciences#Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.