38 Facts About Hermann Weyl

Hermann Weyl's research has had major significance for theoretical physics as well as purely mathematical disciplines such as number theory.

Hermann Weyl was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, and an important member of the Institute for Advanced Study during its early years.

Hermann Weyl contributed to an exceptionally wide range of mathematical fields, including works on space, time, matter, philosophy, logic, symmetry and the history of mathematics.

Hermann Weyl was one of the first to conceive of combining general relativity with the laws of electromagnetism.

Freeman Dyson wrote that Hermann Weyl alone bore comparison with the "last great universal mathematicians of the nineteenth century", Poincare and Hilbert.

Michael Atiyah, in particular, has commented that whenever he examined a mathematical topic, he found that Hermann Weyl had preceded him.

Hermann Weyl was born in Elmshorn, a small town near Hamburg, in Germany, and attended the Gymnasium Christianeum in Altona.

Hermann Weyl's father, Ludwig Weyl, was a banker; whereas his mother, Anna Weyl, came from a wealthy family.

Hermann Weyl's doctorate was awarded at the University of Gottingen under the supervision of David Hilbert, whom he greatly admired.

In September 1913, in Gottingen, Hermann Weyl married Friederike Bertha Helene Joseph who went by the name Helene.

Hermann and Helene had two sons, Fritz Joachim Weyl and Michael Weyl, both of whom were born in Zurich, Switzerland.

Hermann Weyl married sculptress Ellen Bar, who was the widow of professor Richard Josef Bar of Zurich.

Einstein had a lasting influence on Hermann Weyl, who became fascinated by mathematical physics.

In 1921, Hermann Weyl met Erwin Schrodinger, a theoretical physicist who at the time was a professor at the University of Zurich.

Hermann Weyl had some sort of childless love affair with Schrodinger's wife Annemarie Schrodinger, while at the same time Anny was helping raise an illegitimate daughter of Erwin's named Ruth Georgie Erica March, who was born in 1934 in Oxford, England.

Hermann Weyl was a Plenary Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1928 at Bologna and an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1936 at Oslo.

Hermann Weyl was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1928 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1940.

Hermann Weyl left Zurich in 1930 to become Hilbert's successor at Gottingen, leaving when the Nazis assumed power in 1933, particularly as his wife was Jewish.

Hermann Weyl had been offered one of the first faculty positions at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, but had declined because he did not desire to leave his homeland.

Hermann Weyl's ashes remained in private hands until 1999, at which time they were interred in an outdoor columbarium vault in the Princeton Cemetery.

The remains of Hermann's son Michael Weyl are interred right next to Hermann's ashes in the same columbarium vault.

In 1911 Hermann Weyl published Uber die asymptotische Verteilung der Eigenwerte in which he proved that the eigenvalues of the Laplacian in the compact domain are distributed according to the so-called Hermann Weyl law.

Hermann Weyl returned to this topic several times, considered elasticity system and formulated the Hermann Weyl conjecture.

In 1913, Hermann Weyl published Die Idee der Riemannschen Flache, which gave a unified treatment of Riemann surfaces.

Hermann Weyl tracked the development of relativity physics in his Raum, Zeit, Materie from 1918, reaching a 4th edition in 1922.

Hermann Weyl's gauge theory was an unsuccessful attempt to model the electromagnetic field and the gravitational field as geometrical properties of spacetime.

In 1929, Hermann Weyl introduced the concept of the vierbein into general relativity.

From 1923 to 1938, Hermann Weyl developed the theory of compact groups, in terms of matrix representations.

Hermann Weyl showed how to use exponential sums in diophantine approximation, with his criterion for uniform distribution mod 1, which was a fundamental step in analytic number theory.

Hermann Weyl was able to develop most of classical calculus, while using neither the axiom of choice nor proof by contradiction, and avoiding Georg Cantor's infinite sets.

Hermann Weyl appealed in this period to the radical constructivism of the German romantic, subjective idealist Fichte.

Shortly after publishing The Continuum Hermann Weyl briefly shifted his position wholly to the intuitionism of Brouwer.

Hermann Weyl wanted a continuum that was not an aggregate of points.

Hermann Weyl predicted that in the subsequent 20 years, mathematicians would come to realize the total vagueness of notions such as real numbers, sets, and countability, and moreover, that asking about the truth or falsity of the least upper bound property of the real numbers was as meaningful as asking about truth of the basic assertions of Hegel on the philosophy of nature.

However, within a few years Hermann Weyl decided that Brouwer's intuitionism did put too great restrictions on mathematics, as critics had always said.

Hermann Weyl succeeds in developing the beginnings of analysis in a natural manner, all the time preserving the contact with intuition much more closely than had been done before.

In 1929, Hermann Weyl proposed an equation, known as Hermann Weyl equation, for use in a replacement to Dirac equation.

Quasiparticles that behave as Hermann Weyl fermions were discovered in 2015, in a form of crystals known as Hermann Weyl semimetals, a type of topological material.