Van Kampen was born to Dutch parents in
Belgium, where his father had recently taken a job as an accountant in
Antwerp. At the outbreak of
World War I the family moved back to the
Netherlands, first to
Amsterdam and in 1918 to
The Hague. At the age of 16 he graduated from high school and entered
Leiden University to study mathematics. After his undergraduate studies he continued with a doctorate study at the same university under the guidance of
Willem van der Woude. In 1927, Van Kampen traveled to the
University of Göttingen to meet with
Bartel van der Waerden and
Pavel Aleksandrov. In the summer of 1928 he worked with
Emil Artin at the
University of Hamburg. Around that time, while still only 20 years old, he was offered a position by
Johns Hopkins University in the United States. He received his Ph.D. degree with Van der Woude in Leiden in 1929, writing a dissertation entitled
Die kombinatorische Topologie und die Dualitaetssaetze. In 1931, Van Kampen took up the position which he had been offered at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore,
Maryland, and travelled to the United States. There he met
Oscar Zariski who had taught at Johns Hopkins as a Johnston Scholar from 1927 until 1929, when he had joined the Faculty. Zariski had been working on the
fundamental group of the
complement of an
algebraic curve, and he had found generators and relations for the fundamental group but was unable to show that he had found sufficient relations to give a
presentation for the group. Van Kampen solved the problem, showing that Zariski's relations were sufficient, and the result is now known as the Zariski–Van Kampen theorem. This led Van Kampen to formulate and prove what is nowadays known as the
Seifert–Van Kampen theorem. By the late 1930s, Van Kampen started to suffer from headaches which in 1941 were diagnosed to arise from a tumor originating from a birth mark near his ear. After three surgeries in 1941 and 1942, Van Kampen succumbed to cancer and died on 11 February 1942. ==Publications==