Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl (November 9 1885 –
December 9 1955) was a German
mathematician. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland and then Princeton, he is closely identified with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. His research has had major
significance for theoretical physics as well as pure disciplines including
number theory. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, and a key member of the Institute for
Advanced Study in its early years, in terms of creating an integrated and international view.
Weyl published technical and some general works on space, time, matter, philosophy, logic, symmetry and the
history of mathematics. He was one of the first to conceive of combining
general relativity with the laws of electromagnetism. While no mathematician of his generation aspired to the 'universalism' of
Henri Poincaré or Hilbert, Weyl came as close as anyone. Michael Atiyah, in particular, has commented that whenever he looked into an area, he found that Weyl had
preceded him (The Mathematical Intelligencer (1984), vol.6 no.1).
The similarity of the names sometimes led to his being confused with André Weil. A
communal joke for mathematicians was that, each being of great stature, this was a rare example where such mistakes would not
cause offence on either side.
Biography
Weyl was born in Elmshorn, a town near Hamburg, in
Germany.
From 1904 to 1908 he studied mathematics and physics in both
Göttingen and Munich. His doctorate was awarded at the
University of Göttingen under the supervision of David Hilbert whom he greatly admired. After taking a teaching post for a few years, he left Göttingen for
Zürich to take the chair of mathematics in the ETH Zürich, where he was a colleague of
Einstein who was working out the details of the theory of general relativity. Einstein had a lasting influence on Weyl who became
fascinated by the mathematical physics. Weyl met Erwin Schrödinger in 1921, who was
appointed Professor at the University of Zürich. They were to become close friends
over time.
Weyl left Zürich in 1930 to become Hilbert's successor at Göttingen, leaving when the Nazis assumed power in 1933. The events
persuaded him to move to the new Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey. He remained there until his retirement in 1951. Together
with his wife, he spent his time in Princeton and Zürich, and died in Zürich in 1955.
Contributions
Geometric foundations of manifolds and physics
- Further information: Weyl transformation, Weyl
tensor
In 1913, Weyl published Die Idee der Riemannschen Fläche (The Concept of a Riemann
Surface), which gave a unified treatment of Riemann surfaces. In it Weyl utilized
point set topology, in order to make Riemann surface theory more rigorous, a model
followed in later work on manifolds. He absorbed L. E. J. Brouwer's early work in topology for this purpose.
Weyl, as a major figure in the Göttingen school, was fully apprised of Albert
Einstein's work from its early days. He tracked the development of relativity
physics in his Raum, Zeit, Materie (Space, Time, Matter) from 1918, reaching a 4th edition in 1922. In 1918, he
introduced the notion of gauge, and gave the first example of what is now known as a
gauge theory. Weyl's gauge theory was an unsuccessful attempt to model the electromagnetic field and the gravitational field as
geometrical properties of spacetime. The Weyl tensor in
Riemannian geometry is of major importance in understanding the nature of
conformal geometry.
His overall approach in physics was based on the phenomenological philosophy of
Edmund Husserl, specifically his 1913 Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und
phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Concepts of a Pure
Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction). Apparently this was Weyl's way of dealing with
Einstein's controversial dependence on the phenomenological physics of Ernst Mach.
Husserl had reacted strongly to Gottlob Frege's criticism of his first work on the
philosophy of arithmetic and was investigating the sense of mathematical and other structures, which Frege had distinguished from
empirical reference. Hence there is good reason for viewing gauge theory as it developed from Weyl's ideas as a formalism of
physical measurement and not a theory of anything physical, i.e. as scientific
formalism.
Topological groups, Lie groups and representation theory
-
From 1923 to 1938, Weyl developed the theory of compact groups, in terms of matrix representations. In the
compact Lie group case he proved a fundamental character formula.
These results are foundational in understanding the symmetry structure of quantum
mechanics, which he put on a group-theoretic basis. This included spinors. Together with
the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, in
large measure due to John von Neumann, this gave the treatment familiar since about
1930. Non-compact groups and their representations, particularly the Heisenberg group,
were also deeply involved. From this time, and certainly much helped by Weyl's expositions, Lie groups and Lie algebras became a mainstream part both of pure mathematics and
theoretical physics.
His book The Classical Groups, a seminal if difficult text, reconsidered invariant
theory. It covered symmetric groups, general linear groups, orthogonal groups, and
symplectic groups and results on their invariants and representations.
Harmonic analysis and analytic number theory
-
Weyl also showed how to use exponential sums in diophantine approximation, with his criterion for uniform distribution mode 1, which was a
fundamental step in analytic number theory. This work applied to the
Riemann zeta function, as well as additive number theory. It was developed by many others.
Foundations of mathematics
In The Continuum Weyl developed the logic of predicative analysis using the
lower levels of Bertrand Russell's ramified
theory of types. He was able to develop most of classical calculus, while using neither the axiom of choice nor proof by contradiction, and avoiding
George Cantor's infinite sets. Weyl appealed in this
period to the radical constructivism of the German romantic, subjective idealist Fichte.
Shortly after publishing The Continuum Weyl briefly shifted his position wholly to the intuitionism of Brouwer. In The Continuum, the constructible points exist as discrete entities. Weyl
wanted a continuum that was not an aggregate of points. He wrote a controversial article
proclaiming that, for himself and L. E. J. Brouwer, "We are the revolution." This article was far more influential in propagating
intuitionistic views than the original works of Brouwer himself.
George Pólya and Weyl, during a mathematicians' gathering in Zürich (February 9, 1918),
made a bet concerning the future direction of mathematics. 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 Georg Hegel on the philosophy of nature.[1]
However, within a few years Weyl decided that Brouwer's intuitionism did put too great restrictions on mathematics, as critics
had always said. The "Crisis" article had disturbed Weyl's formalist teacher
Hilbert, but later in the 1920s Weyl partially reconciled his position with that of Hilbert.
After about 1928 Weyl had apparently decided that mathematical intuitionism was not compatible with his enthusiasm for the
phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, as he had
apparently earlier thought. In the last decades of his life Weyl emphasized mathematics as "symbolic construction" and moved to a
position closer not only to Hilbert but to that of Ernst Cassirer. Weyl however rarely
refers to Cassirer, and wrote only brief articles and passages articulating this position.
Quotes
Weyl's comment, although half a joke, sums up his personality:
- 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.
- The question for the ultimate foundations and the ultimate meaning of mathematics remains open; we do not know in which
direction it will find its final solution nor even whether a final objective answer can be expected at all. "Mathematizing" may
well be a creative activity of man, like language or music, of primary originality, whose historical decisions defy complete
objective rationalization.
- —Gesammelte Abhandlungen
- The problems of mathematics are not problems in a vacuum....
- [Impredicative definition's] vicious circle, which has crept into analysis through
the foggy nature of the usual set and function concepts, is not a minor, easily avoided form of error in analysis.
- In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of every individual discipline of mathematics.
Topics named after Hermann Weyl
Notes
- ^ Gurevich, Yuri. "Platonism, Constructivism and
Computer Proofs vs Proofs by Hand", Bulletin of the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science, 1995. This
paper describes a letter discovered by Gurevich in 1995 that documents the bet. It is said that when the friendly bet ended, the
individuals gathered cited Pólya as the victor (with Kurt Gödel not in concurrence).
References
Primary
- 1913. Idee des Riemannflāche, 2d 1955. The Concept of a Riemann Surface. Addison-Wesley.
- 1918. Das Kontinuum, trans. 1987 The Continuum : A Critical Examination of the Foundation of Analysis.
ISBN 0-486-67982-9
- 1918. Raum, Zeit, Materie.5 edns. to 1922 ed. with notes by Jūrgen Ehlers, 1980. trans. 4th edn. Henry Brose, 1922
Space Time Matter, Methuen, rept. 1952 Dover. ISBN 0-486-60267-2
- 1923. Mathematische Analyse des Raumproblems.
- 1924. Was ist Materie?
- 1925. (publ. 1988 ed. K. Chandrasekharan) Riemann's Geometrische Idee.
- 1927. Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft, 2d edn. 1949. Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science.
Princeton 0689702078
- 1928. Gruppentheorie und Quantenmechanik. transl. by H. P. Robertson, The Theory of Groups and Quantum
Mechanics, 1931, rept. 1950 Dover. ISBN 0-486-60269-9
- 1933. The Open World Yale, rept. 1989 Oxbow Press ISBN 0-918024-70-6
- 1934. Mind and Nature U. of Pennsylvania Press.
- 1934. "On generalized Riemann matrices," Ann. of Math. 35: 400–415.
- 1935. Elementary Theory of Invariants.
- 1939. Classical Groups: Their Invariants And Representations. Princeton. ISBN 0-691-05756-7
- 1940. Algebraic Theory of Numbers rept. 1998 Princeton U. Press. ISBN 0-691-05917-9
- 1952. Symmetry. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02374-3
- 1968. in K. Chandrasekharan ed, Gesammelte Abhandlungen. Vol IV. Springer.
Secondary
- ed. K. Chandrasekharan,Hermann Weyl, 1885-1985, Centenary lectures delivered by C. N. Yang, R. Penrose, A. Borel, at the
ETH Zürich Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo - 1986, published for the Eidgenössische
Technische Hochschule, Zürich.
- Deppert, Wolfgang et al., eds., Exact Sciences and their Philosophical Foundations. Vorträge des Internationalen
Herman-Weyl-Kongresses, Kiel 1985, Bern; New York; Paris: Peter Lang 1988,
- Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots
1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.
- Erhard Scholz; Robert Coleman; Herbert Korte; Hubert Goenner; Skuli Sigurdsson; Norbert Straumann eds. Hermann Weyl's Raum
- Zeit - Materie and a General Introduction to his Scientific Work (Oberwolfach Seminars) (ISBN 3-7643-6476-9)
Springer-Verlag New York, New York, N.Y.
- Thomas Hawkins, Emergence of the Theory of Lie Groups, New York: Springer, 2000.
External links and references
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