Bartel Leendert van der Waerden

Bartel Leendert van der Waerden ( / ʋardən / ) ( born February 2, 1903 in Amsterdam, † January 12, 1996 in Zurich) was a Dutch mathematician.

Life

Van der Waerden was born the son of a mathematics teacher and showed an early talent for mathematics. In 1919 he began his studies of mathematics in Amsterdam (including Hendrik de Vries ) and then went to Göttingen, where he among other things, studied with Emmy Noether. In 1928 he became a professor in Groningen. From 1931 to 1945 he was professor at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Leipzig and its director. The simultaneous presence of Werner Heisenberg and an interest in quantum mechanics had drawn him there. The book The group theoretic method in quantum mechanics, there arose from joint seminars. In the 1940s, he was in Germany difficulties because he did not want to give up his Dutch citizenship. After the war he worked for Shell in Amsterdam, went to the U.S. Johns Hopkins University and was a professor from 1948 to 1951 in Amsterdam. After that he went to the University of Zurich and taught there from 1951 to 1972.

Work

He became famous for his two-volume textbook on algebra, whose first edition appeared in 1930 under the title Modern algebra and is based on the lectures by Emil Artin and Emmy Noether. As the first textbook it took taking place in the early 20th century conversion of algebra away from concrete computational techniques to the investigation of abstract structures consistently after. This made it for many decades as an influential standard work.

In a long series of articles in Mathematische Annalen he tried the Algebraic Geometry of the Italian school of Francesco Severi, Federigo Enriques, inter alia, to put on a strict purely algebraic basis and the " enumerative calculus " of Hannibal Schubert, but was herein by André Weil, among others "Outdated ".

He also dealt with the application of elementary geometry, the axioms of geometry, statistics, topology, number theory and other things, so that you can refer to him as one of the last generalists mathematics. Simultaneously with Ernst Witt et al he gave a geometric description of the classification of Lie algebras. The set of Van der Waerden is an important set of Ramsey theory, a field of combinatorics.

With Kurt Schütte 1953 he proved the kiss number problem in three dimensions, that a central ball can touch a maximum of an additional twelve equal sized balls. Suspected this had been Isaac Newton, while David Gregory said it would be 13

In addition, he was also a leading historian of science, who dealt in particular with Greek mathematics and the history of algebra.

Van der Waerden of Sciences was elected on 12 January 1996 an honorary member of the Saxon Academy. He was a long time editor of the Mathematische Annalen. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice (The foundation of algebraic geometry from Severi to André Weil).

His doctoral include Hans Richter, Wei - Liang Chow, David van Dantzig, Erwin Neuenschwander, Günther Free, Guerino Mazzola, Herbert Seifert.

Writings

  • Algebra. 2 vols. 9th edition. Springer, 1993 ( referred to in older editions Modern Algebra, first 1930/1931 )
  • Introduction to Algebraic Geometry. Springer, 1973 ( Reprint of a series of magazine articles, first in 1939 ).
  • Groups of linear transformations. Springer, 1935.
  • Mathematical Statistics. Springer, 1971.
  • Waking science. Volume 1: Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek mathematics. Birkhäuser, 1956 ( first Dutch 1950 English edition of Science Awakening. , 1954). In a second band the beginnings of astronomy are treated (2nd edition 1980).
  • The Pythagoreans - religious brotherhood and school of science, Artemis, 1979.
  • The astronomy of the Greeks. An Introduction. University Press, 1988.
  • Geometry and algebra in ancient civilizations, 1983,
  • History of Algebra, 1985 ( engl. A history of algebra. Springer, 1986).
  • Group theory and quantum mechanics. 2nd edition. Springer 1986 ( German: The group-theoretical method in quantum mechanics, Springer, 1932. ).
  • (Ed.): Sources of quantum mechanics. In 1967. Reprint dover 2007 (reprint of important works of quantum mechanics with a historical introduction by van der Waerden ).
  • Mathematics for scientists. BI university paperback, 1975.
  • My Göttingen apprenticeship. In: Reports DMV. 1997, No. 2 (Lecture 1979 ).
  • The arithmetic of the Pythagoreans. Part 1 Part 1 Mathematische Annalen. 1947/1949. Part 2
  • Zenon and the foundational crisis of Greek mathematics. Mathematische Annalen. 1940/1941.
  • With Schütte: The Problem of 13 balls. Mathematische Annalen. In 1953.
  • Spinoranalyse. Message Akad Göttingen. 1928.
  • The classification of simple Lie groups. Mathematical Journal., 1933.
  • About the interaction of mathematics and physics. Elements of mathematics. In 1973.
  • Incidence and reflection in mathematics. Part 1 Elements of mathematics. 1954th Part 2 and Part 3
  • The Galois algebra since. Annual Report DMV. In 1966.
Van der Waerden's theorem David Gregory (mathematician) Wei-Liang Chow Alexander Soifer Integrated Authority File
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