Hermann Weyl (9.11.1885-8.12.1955) was a German mathematician. He was born in Elmshorn. He graduated from the University of Göttingen (1908). In 1913 — 30 he was professor at the Zurich Polytechnic and in 1930 —33 professor at the University of Göttingen. In 1933 he emigrated to the USA, where until 1951 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, after which he returned to Zurich.
He made a great contribution to many branches of mathematics and mathematical physics and to their practical application. In particular, Weyl's work played a large part in the recognition of the importance of the ideas of symmetry for mathematics as well as for physics; he did much to make the concept of symmetry a physical one too. In 1918 — 19, independently of others, he put forward the idea of a unified description of field and matter on the basis of a geometrised picture of the world (unified field theory) and proposed the first version of such a theory. He was the first to point out (1929) the possibility of constructing a two-component relativistic theory of particles of spin 1/2. A number of Weyl's works also concern the philosophical questions of mathematics. He was a representative of intuitionism.