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Van der Waerden's early work on physics
Today, the Dutch mathematician, Bartel L. van der Waerden (1903-1996), is well known
for his contributions to abstract algebra, especially algebraic geometry.
Yet it is not so well-known that he was also interested inquantum physics throughout his
life, and that he even published in this field. On the request of Paul Ehrenfest,
van der Waerden invented spinor calculus (1929), and applied it in the context of general
relativity theory in an article (1933) written along with Leopold Infeld. He also published a
text book on the group-theoretic method in quantum mechanics (1932). In this talk I shall
outline the academic milieu of Göttingen and Leipzig from which these works originated,
and analyse the interrelation between mathematics and physics within them.
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