Hermann Weyl, 1885-1955

Abstract

Hermann Weyl was born on 9 November 1885, the son of Ludwig and Anna Weyl, in the small town of Elmshorn near Hamburg. When his schooldays in Altona ended in 1904 he entered Göttingen University as a country lad of eighteen, and there remained (except for a year at Munich), first as student and then as Privatdozent, until his call to Zurich in 1913. Of these days he said (in the obituary of Hilbert for this Society, 1944), ‘Hilbert and Minkowski were the real heroes of the great and brilliant period which mathematics experienced during the first decade of the century in Göttingen, unforgettable to those who lived through it. Klein ruled over it like a distant god, “divus Felix”, from above the clouds.’ Among those nearer to his own age whom he found there were Carathéodory and Harald Bohr, Courant, Zermelo, Erhard Schmidt. While still a schoolboy he had picked up in his father’s house an old copy of the Critique of Pure Reason, and absorbed with enthusiasm Kant’s thesis of the a priori nature of Euclidean geometry. But in Göttingen Hilbert had just completed his classical work on the foundations of geometry, with its host of strange ‘counter’-geometries. Kantian philosophy could not survive this blow: Weyl transferred his allegiance to Hilbert. ‘I resolved to study whatever this man had written. At the end of my first year I went home with the “Zahlbericht” under my arm, and during the summer vacation I worked my way through it—without any previous knowledge of elementary number theory or Galois theory. These were the happiest months of my life, whose shine, across years burdened with our common share of doubt and failure, still comforts my soul.’ (133, 1944.)