Bartel Leendert van der Waerden
Bartel Leendert van der Waerden | |
---|---|
Doctoral advisor | Hendrik de Vries |
Doctoral students | Wei-Liang Chow David van Dantzig Jan van Deemter Günther Frei Guerino Mazzola Herbert Seifert |
Bartel Leendert van der Waerden (Dutch: [vɑn dər ˈʋaːrdə(n)]; 2 February 1903 – 12 January 1996) was a Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics.
Biography
Education and early career
Van der Waerden learned advanced mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Göttingen, from 1919 until 1926. He was much influenced by Emmy Noether at Göttingen, Germany. Amsterdam awarded him a Ph.D. for a thesis on algebraic geometry, supervised by Hendrick de Vries.[1] Göttingen awarded him the habilitation in 1928. In that year, at the age of 25, he accepted a professorship at the University of Groningen.
In his 27th year, Van der Waerden published his
In July 1929 he married the sister of mathematician Franz Rellich, Camilla Juliana Anna, and they had three children.
Nazi Germany
After the
Postwar career
Following the war, Van der Waerden was repatriated to the Netherlands rather than returning to
In 1949, Van der Waerden became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1951 this was changed to a foreign membership.[4] In 1973 he received the Pour le Mérite.[5]
Contributions
Van der Waerden is mainly remembered for his work on abstract algebra. He also wrote on algebraic geometry, topology, number theory, geometry, combinatorics, analysis, probability and statistics, and quantum mechanics (he and Heisenberg had been colleagues at Leipzig). In later years, he turned to the history of mathematics and science. His historical writings include Ontwakende wetenschap (1950), which was translated into English as Science Awakening (1954),[6] Sources of Quantum Mechanics (1967),[7] Geometry and Algebra in Ancient Civilizations (1983), and A History of Algebra (1985).
Van der Waerden has over 1000 academic descendants, most of them through three of his students, David van Dantzig (Ph.D. Groningen 1931), Herbert Seifert (Ph.D. Leipzig 1932), and Hans Richter (Ph.D. Leipzig 1936, co-advised by Paul Koebe).[1]
See also
- Van der Waerden notation
- Van der Waerden number
- Van der Waerden's conjecture
- Van der Waerden's theorem
- Van der Waerden test
Notes
- ^ a b Bartel Leendert van der Waerden at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ Soifer, pp. 393–417.
- ^ Soifer, pp. 418–474.
- ^ "Bartel Leendert van der Waerden (1903–1996)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
- ^ "Bartel Leendert van der Waerden" (in German). Orden Pour le Mérite. Archived from the original on 8 June 2020.
- doi:10.1086/348434.
- .
References
- Geombinatorics.
- Alexander Soifer (2015) The Scholar and the State: In Search of Van der Waerden, ISBN 978-3-0348-0711-1
Further reading
- Schlote, K.-H., 2005, "Moderne Algebra" in Grattan-Guinness, I., ed., Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics. Elsevier: 901–16.
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Bartel Leendert van der Waerden", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- Dold-Samplonius, Yvonne (March 1997). "Interview with Bartel Leendert van Der Waerden (conducted in 1993)" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 44 (3): 313–320.
- Freudenthal, H., 1962, "Review: B. L. van der Waerden, Science Awakening" in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 68 (6):543–45.