Verena Huber-Dyson

Her parents, Karl (Charles) Huber (1893–1946) and Berthy Ryffel (1899–1945), were Swiss nationals who raised Verena and her sister Adelheid ("Heidi", 1925–1987) in Athens, Greece, where the girls attended the German-speaking Deutsche Schule, or German School of Athens, until forced to return to Switzerland in 1940 by the war.

Charles Huber, who had managed the Middle Eastern operations of Bühler AG, a Swiss food-process engineering firm, began working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), monitoring the treatment of prisoners of war in internment camps.

As the ICRC delegate to India and Ceylon, he was responsible for Italian prisoners held in British camps, but also visited German and Allied camps in Europe.

Verena Esther Huber-Dyson (May 6, 1923 – March 12, 2016) was a Swiss-American mathematician, known for her work on group theory and formal logic.

She has been described as a "brilliant mathematician", who did research on the interface between algebra and logic, focusing on undecidability in group theory.

At the time of her death, she was emeritus faculty in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta.

Huber-Dyson was born Verena Esther Huber in Naples, Italy, on May 6, 1923.

Verena married Hans-Georg Haefeli, a fellow mathematician, in 1942, and was divorced in 1948.

In 1945-46 he served as an ICRC delegate to the United States, which he described to Verena as a place she "definitely ought to experience at length and in depth but just as definitely ought not to settle in."

Her first daughter, Katarina Halm (née Halm), was born in 1945.

She studied mathematics, with minors in physics and philosophy, at the University of Zurich, where she obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1947 with a thesis in finite group theory under the supervision of Andreas Speiser.

Huber-Dyson accepted a postdoctoral fellow appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1948, where she worked on group theory and formal logic.

She also began teaching at Goucher College near Baltimore during this time.

She subsequently married Freeman Dyson in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 11, 1950.

They had two children together, Esther Dyson (born July 14, 1951, in Zurich) and George Dyson (born 1953, Ithaca, New York), and divorced in 1958.

""There is more to truth than can be caught by proof"."

She moved to California with her daughter Katarina, began teaching at San Jose State University in 1959, and then joined Alfred Tarski's Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Huber-Dyson taught at San Jose State University, the University of Zürich, Monash University, as well as at University of California, Berkeley, Adelphi University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, in mathematics and in philosophy departments.

She accepted a position in the philosophy department of the University of Calgary in 1973, becoming emerita in 1988.

After retiring from Calgary, Verena Huber-Dyson moved back to South Pender Island in British Columbia, where she lived for 14 years.

She died on March 12, 2016, in Bellingham, Washington, at the age of 92.