Figure 2. The first half page of Heegaard's Autobiographical NoteThe notes were written in 1945 (in Norwegian) when Heegaard was 73 years old and they were meant as a family history told to his children and grandchildren, but they do contain a lot of information that is relevant for our study. Unfortunately, a few pages are missing precisely at two critical points in Heegaard's life. Nevertheless, the notes supply much more information about Heegaard's life than any other single source we have found, and we have chosen to use them as a skeleton for the following account. Our rather extensive quotes from this source have been indented in a LaTeX ``quote'' environment, as in this example which refers to the semester Heegaard spent in Paris in 1893.
``Later, I have always regretted that I accepted the advice not to attend lectures by Poincaré, who was claimed to be unintelligible. His very intuitive exposition has later on been of great importance to me when I met it in printed books.''Heegaard wrote long, rather complicated sentences, probably influenced by his regular use of German. In our translation we have attempted a compromise between the original style and current usage in English.
A transcript of the autobiographical notes (in Danish) has been produced
at Odense Unversity and is available on the internet
(http://www.imada.sdu.dk/
hjm/heegaard).
In our account we also quote from other sources, again in our own (occasionally somewhat free) translation. Such quotes are not indented. Here is an example from a letter that Heegaard wrote to Jakob Nielsen in 1935:
``I have been terribly busy with University work. Therefore, I have
not written to you, nor to Dehn. Where is Dehn at the moment? I made all
the mathematicians sign an application to the Science Academy for 2000
Kr. so that he could come up here in April of 1936, attend the Congress
and give lectures and exercises. Now the board is trying to figure out
that a grant would be against the statutes.
''