Brouwer, Luitzen Egbertus Jan (1881–1966)

Dutch mathematician. He worked on the nature and foundation of mathematics, and was the founder of the intuitionist school of mathematics, or intuitionism. He held that the foundation of mathematics is a fundamental intuition of temporal sequence – the counting of moments of time – and that numbers and mathematical entities were constructible from this intuition.

He was opposed to the derivation of mathematics from logic (as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead had attempted), and from geometry (as in the formalism of David Hilbert). He also worked in the field of topology (the study of geometric surfaces).

Brouwer, born in Overschie, was professor of mathematics at Amsterdam until 1951. His principal work is Intuitionism and Formalism 1912.