Hermann Weyl (1885-1955) was born in Elmshorn, Germany. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Göttingen University in 1908, under the supervision of David Hilbert. He remained at Göttingen until 1913. Then he became Chair of Mathematics at the ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich), where he was a colleague of Albert Einstein. During the 1928-1929 academic year he was the Jones Research Professor of Mathematical Physics at Princeton University.

Weyl left Zürich in 1930 to become Hilbert's successor at Göttingen. Repelled by the policies of the Nazi regime, however, he left Germany in 1933 to join the Faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study as its third member. Weyl retired in 1951, becoming an emeritus professor.

Weyl was extremely prolific and credited with many advances in mathematics and physics. His books included "Das Kontinuum" (The Continuum) and "Raum-Zeit-Materie" (Space-Time-Matter) (both 1918); "Gruppentheorie und Quantenmechanik" (Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics) (1928); "Elementary Theory of Invariants" (1935); "The classical groups" (1939); "Algebraic Theory of Numbers" (1940); "Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science" (1949); "Symmetry" (1952); and "The Concept of a Riemannian Surface" (1955).

Weyl had two children with his first wife, the writer and translator Helene Weyl (1893-1948). Their children were Joachim and Michael. Joachim had two daughters with his wife Sonja, Christina and Annemarie. In 1950, two years after Helene's death, Weyl married the Swiss sculptor Ellen Baer Lohnstein. After his retirement, Weyl moved to Switzerland, though he returned to the United States frequently.