Věra Trnková


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

Later life and career

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