Review of The Scholar and the State: In Search of Van der Waerden by Alexander Soifer

Alexander Soifer had previously written the book The Mathematical Coloring Book: Mathematics of Coloring and the Colorful Life of its Creators which was part math, part history, part memoir (it was written in the first person). I quote my review of that book: Ordinary math books are not written in the first person; however, this is no ordinary math book! I pity the Library of Congress person who has to classify it. This book contains much math of interest and pointers to more math of interest. All of it has to do with coloring: Coloring the plane (Alexander Soifer’s favorite problem), coloring a graph (e.g., the four color theorem), and of course Ramsey Theory. However, the book also has biographies of the people involved and scholarly discussions of who-conjectured-what-when and who-proved-what-when. When I took Calculus the textbook had a 120-word passage about the life of Newton. This book has a 120-page passage about the life of van der Waerden. Saying that the prior book contained a 120-page passage about the life of van der Waerden (henceforth VDW) was an exaggeration; however, the book under review is a 450-page biography . . . that does not seem quite right. The book does mainly focus on VDW’s life, but there are so many profound issues that arise, that I am reluctant to call it a biography. Why is VDW’s life worth writing about? While his contributions to Algebraic Geometry, and the theorem in combinatorics that bears his name, are quite impressive, these are not the reasons. Most of the book is about the time VDW lived in Germany and the time after that. Why is that remarkable? Because he was a Dutch citizen living in Germany from 1933-1945, under the Nazi regime.