Andries Mac Leod

Andries Hugo Donald MacLeod ( born August 10, 1891 in Ledeburg in Ghent, † March 28, 1977 ) was a Belgian- Swedish mathematician and philosopher.

Mac Leod was the son of botany professor at Ghent Julius Mac Leod (1857-1919), who had Scottish ancestors, and the translator Florence Mac Leod, which has translated Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin.

He attended the Athenaeum in Ghent, where he founded a philosophical circles, the Marcel Minnaert was a member, with whom he was friends for life.

After graduation, he studied mathematics and physics in Ghent with a doctorate in 1914 on hydrodynamics. From the outbreak of the First World War, he was surprised on a travel to Sweden, where he remained through the war, worked in the library of Gösta Mittag-Leffler and philosophy lectures by Adolph Phalen (1884-1931) heard in Uppsala.

In 1921 he returned to Belgium, where he was a teacher of physics and mathematics in Diest and Ghent. At the same time he published in 1922 his first book on non-Euclidean geometry, and in 1927 his first philosophical work. In 1939 he moved with his Swedish wife to Sweden.

In 1960 he became an honorary doctorate in Uppsala.

Writings

• Introduction à la géometrie non- euclidienne, Paris: J. Hermann, 1922 Archive
• Over een van Geval wenteling eener ideal vloeistof, waarbij optreden negatieve drukkingen, Wis. -en Natuurkundig Tijdschrift, Volume 2, 1923, pp. 22-60 (On the case of a rotation of an ideal fluid, occur in the negative pressures, Dissertation )
• Sur diverses questions se présentant dans l' étude du concept de réalité, Paris: J. Hermann, 1927
• Beskaffenhet och ett av innehåll medvetande, Uppsala: Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskaps - Samfundet, 1960 ( nature and content of consciousness )
• Verklighet och negation, Stockholm and Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972 ( reality and negation)
• Tre uppsatser om Hägerström, Zeno of Elea från och relativitetsteorien, Uppsala 1973 ( Three essays on Hägerström, Zeno of Elea and the theory of relativity )