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Top 10 Fun Facts about Bartel Leendert van der Waerden

Bartel Leendert van der Waerden was a Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics. He is considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and the father of modern algebraic geometry.

He was born on 2 February 1903 in Amsterdam, to Theodorus van der Waerden and Dorothea Adriana. His father was a civil engineer who taught mathematics and mechanics at the University of Amsterdam.

van der Waerden was married to Camilla Juliana Anna and together they had three children. He died on 12 January 1996  in Zurich, Switzerland at the age of 92 years.

Here are the top10 Fun Facts about Bartel Leendert van der Waerden.

1. Van der Waerden Showed an Interest in Mathematics at an Early Age

Van der Waerden showed an interest in mathematics at an early age. His father was an engineer and a teacher of mathematics with an active interest in politics. As a child, van der Waerden was not allowed to read his father’s mathematics books but was told to play outside.

This made him fascinated to discover mathematics for himself, and while outside he preferred playing the solitary game called ‘‘Pythagoras.’’ This consisted of pieces that could be moved around freely and with which a square, a rectangle, or a triangle could be constructed in a variety of ways.

As a schoolboy, he regularly went to the reading hall of the public library in Amsterdam, where he studied a treatise in analytic geometry by Johan Antony Barrau, who was a professor at Groningen university.

2. He Became a Professor at the Age of 25

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van der Waerden entered the Hogere Burger School of Amsterdam in 1914. As a school pupil at the Hogere Burger School, van der Waerden showed remarkable promise and he developed for himself the laws of trigonometry.

He studied mathematics at the University of Amsterdam, beginning his course in 1919 at the age of sixteen. He graduated in 1926 and was awarded a Ph.D. for a thesis on algebraic geometry, supervised by Hendrick de Vries.

Göttingen awarded him the habilitation in 1928. In that year, at the age of 25, he accepted a professorship at the University of Groningen.

3. He Wrote the First Book of Modern Algebra

Bartel Leendert van der Waerden made major contributions to algebraic geometry,  quantum mechanics, and other fields. He liberally published the history of mathematics. His 2-volume work Modern Algebra is one of the most influential and popular mathematical books ever written.

The book was one of the first textbooks to use an abstract axiomatic approach to groups, rings, and fields, and was by far the most successful, becoming the standard reference for graduate algebra for several decades.

 It had a tremendous impact and is widely considered to be the major text on algebra in the twentieth century.

4. He Lived in Germany during World War 2

In 1931 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig in Germany, where began to publish a series of articles in Mathematische Annalen on Algebraic geometry.

After the Nazis seized power, and through World War II, Van der Waerden remained at Leipzig and passed up opportunities to leave Nazi Germany. This made his life difficult time since he refused to give up his Dutch nationality and he came under pressure from the Nazis not to publish papers by Jewish authors.

van der Waerden remained in Germany during the entire period of war until 1945 when returned to the Netherlands. this was after American soldiers arrived and told everyone to return to their country of origin.

5. He is considered to be the Father of Algebra

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Van der Waerden worked on algebraic geometry, abstract algebra, groups, topology, number theory, geometry, combinatorics, analysis, and probability theory.

He also worked on mathematical statistics, quantum mechanics, the history of mathematics, the history of modern physics, the history of astronomy, and the history of ancient science.

In Galois’s theory, he showed the asymptotic result that almost all integral algebraic equations have the full symmetric group as the Galois group. He produced results in invariant theory, linear groups, and Lie groups and generalized some of Emmy Noether’s results on rings.

6. He Served in the Dutch Military for one Year

van der Waerden joined the military for his mandatory year of military duty in 1925, during which he served at the marine base in Den Helder.

While there, he wrote his Ph.D. thesis, ‘‘De algebraiese grondslagen der meetkunde van het aantal,’’ which presented a program for the foundation of algebraic geometry.

Since a dissertation was only accepted in Holland at that time if it was written in Dutch or Latin, van der Waerden published his foundational work with its proofs in several papers in the Mathematische Annalen, while the Dutch dissertation itself consisted only of the statements of the theorems without proofs.

7. He once Worked for the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company

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van der Waerden and returned to Holland in 1945. His situation proved difficult as the Dutch resented him for having remained in Nazi Germany. during the War.

Following his return, van der Waerden had no financial resources until Hans Freudenthal helped him to secure a position at Shell, the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company. Working together with Shell engineers, van der Waerden solved optimization problems, a topic that he came very much to enjoy.

8. He was Married with Three Kids

in 1929, while van der Waerden was visiting Gottingen, he met and married Camilla Rellich. She was a sister to a fellow mathematician and Gottingen university professor Franz Rellich.

The couple’s marriage lasted all their life and together they had three children. Helga their first child was born in Groningen on July 26, 1930, while Ilse and Erick were born in Germany in 1934 and 1937 respectively.

9. van der Waerden Spent Most of his Career in Zürich University

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In 1951 van der Waerden was appointed as the chairperson of mathematics at Zürich University 1951. He spent the rest of his career there and made a great impact in the department of mathematics

van der Waerden stimulated research in Zürich by supervising over 40 doctoral students during his years there.

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).

10. He Wrote about the History of Mathematics and Science

Van der Waerden is mainly remembered for his work on abstract algebra. He also wrote on algebraic geometry, topology, number theory, geometry, and statistics.

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), Sources of Quantum Mechanics (1967), Geometry and Algebra in Ancient Civilizations (1983), and A History of Algebra (1985).