Hermann weyl biography of michaels
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Hermann Weyl: Legacy
“My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful,” said Hermann Weyl, who served on the Institute Faculty from 1933 until his death in 1955. Among all the mathematicians who began their working lives in the twentieth century, Weyl stands out as the one who made major contributions in the greatest number of different areas.
He viewed the field of mathematics as an organic whole rather than a series of individual subjects. His work spanned many areas, including topology, differential geometry, Lie groups, representation theory, quantum mechanics, harmonic analysis, and analytic number theory, and had a major impact on the progress of the entire field of mathematics.
In the Mathematical Intelligencer (1984, vol. 6 no.1), Michael Atiyah (Professor, School of Mathematics, 1969–72) noted that whenever he examined a mathematical topic, he found that Weyl had preceded him. “Wey
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Hermann Weyl: Life
Born to Ludwig and Anna Weyl in Elmshorn, Germany on November 9, 1885, Weyl showed great promise in mathematics even as a young boy. He went to the University of Munich in 1904, and studied mathematics and physics both there and at the University of Göttingen, where, under the supervision of David Hilbert, he received his Ph.D. in 1908. French mathematician and author Jean Dieudonné called him the most gifted of all Hilbert’s students.
Weyl began his teaching career at Göttingen, where he had a significant impact on the field of mathematics. His first book, Die Idee der Riemannschen Fläche (The Concept of a Riemann Surface), published in 1913, grew out of a lecture course he taught on Riemann surfaces. That same year he was given a chair in mathematics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Einstein was also in Zurich at this time, further spurring Weyl’s interest in physics.
Weyl married Helene Joseph in 1913. Known as Hella, Helene had been a
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Biographical Memoirs: Volume 82 (2003)
REFERENCES
Atiyah, M.F., R.H.Bott, and V.K.Patodi. 1973. On the heat equation and the index theorem . Inventiones Math. 19:279–30.
Atiyah, M.F., and R.H.Bott. 1986. A Lefschetz fixed point formula for elliptic and differential operators. Bull. Am. Math. Soc. 72:245– 50.
Bott, R.H. 1988. On induced representations. The mathematical heritage of Herman Weyl. Proc. Symp. Am. Math. Soc. 48:1–14.
Chevalley, C., and A.Weil. 1957. Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) Enseign. Math. III(3).
Donaldson, S.K., and P.B.Kronheimer. 1990. The Geometry of Four-Manifolds. Oxford.
Hodge, W.V.D. 1941. The theory and applications of harmonic integrals. Cambridge.
Mumford, D., J.Fogarty, and F.Kirwan. 1994. Geometric Invariant Theory. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Newmann, M.H.A. 1957. Hermann Weyl. In Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 3, pp. 305–28.
Pressley, A., and G.B.Segal. 1986. L