Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, one of the great mathematicians of this century, died in Zu ¨rich on January 12, 1996. Born in Amsterdam on February 2, 1903, he showed an interest in mathematics at an early age. His father, an engineer and a teacher of mathematics with an active interest in politics-to the left but not a Communist-wanted his son to play outside, away from the mathematics books indoors. The young van der Waerden, however, preferred playing the solitary game called ''Pythagoras.'' This consisted of pieces which could be moved around freely and with which a square, a rectangle, or a triangle could be constructed in a variety of ways. Somewhat later, having somehow come up with the concept of the cosine, he rediscovered trigonometry, starting from the law of cosines. As a schoolboy, he regularly went to the reading hall of the public library in Amsterdam, where he studied a treatise in analytic geometry by Johan Antony Barrau, a professor at Groningen. Part II of that book contained many theorems insufficiently proven, even insufficiently formulated, and prompted van der Waerden to write to the author. Barrau's reaction? Should he leave Groningen, the university would have to nominate van der Waerden as his successor! This actually proved prophetic. Barrau moved to Utrecht in 1927, and in 1928, van der Waerden declined an offer from Rostock to accept his first chair at Groningen.
After van der Waerden finished school, he studied mathematics and physics from 1919 to 1924 at the University of Amsterdam under L. E. J. Brouwer; Roland Weitzenbo ¨ck; Gerrit Mannoury; Hendrik de Vries; and the physicist Jan Dirk van der Waals, son of the Nobel laureate. The most famous of these was Brouwer, who, despite the fact that his most important research contributions were in topology, never gave courses in topology and who only lectured on the foundations of his intuitionism. (He apparently no longer felt convinced of his results in topology because they were not correct from the point of view of intuitionism.) Although van der Waerden studied invariant theory with Weitzenbo ¨ck, he felt he learned the most from Mannoury, the mathematician who introduced topology to Holland.
In 1924, van der Waerden took his final examination with de Vries, whose course in classical algebra he had very much liked. It included subjects like determinants and linear equations, symmetric functions, resultants and discriminants, Sturm's theorem on real roots, Sylvester's ''index of inertia'' for real quadratic forms, and the solution of cubic and biquadratic equations by radicals. Van der Waerden supplemented this course by studying Galois theory and other subjects from Heinrich Weber's textbook on algebra. He also read Felix Klein's Studien u ¨ber das Ikosaeder and thoroughly studied the theory of invariants. While he was still a