Weyl, Hermann (1885–1955)

German mathematician and mathematical physicist who studied mainly topological space and the geometry of Bernhard Riemann. He also studied quantum mechanics and number theory.

Weyl was born in Elmshorn, near Hamburg, and studied at Göttingen. He was professor at the Technische Hochschule in Zürich, Switzerland, 1913–30, and then at Göttingen, but the unfavourable political climate of Nazi Germany prompted him to move to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, USA.

As a colleague of Albert Einstein during 1913, Weyl became interested in the developing general theory of relativity and came to believe (erroneously) that he had found a way to a grand unification of gravitation and electromagnetism. Weyl was able to anticipate the nonconservation of parity, which has since been found to be characteristic of weak interactions between leptons (a class of subatomic particles).

Weyl's most important work on Riemann surfaces was the definition of the complex manifold of the first dimension, which has been important in all later work on the theory of both complex and of differential manifolds.

Weyl's works include Raum-Zeit-Materie/Space-Time-Matter (1918). He also published works on philosophy, logic, and the history of mathematics.