The Dutch mathematician Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer made contributions in the fields of topology and logic. He founded the school of thought known as intuitionism, which is based on the notion that the only dependable basis of mathematics consists of proofs that can actually be constructed in the real world. In addition, he developed a fixed-point theorem and demonstrated the connection between two previously distinct fields of topology--point-set topology and combinatorial topology.

Brouwer was born on February 27, 1881, in Overschie, the Netherlands. His parents were Egbert Brouwer and Henderika Poutsma. Brouwer completed high school in the town of Hoorn at the age of fourteen and attended the Haarlem Gymnasium where he satisfied the Greek and Latin requirements needed to enter a Dutch university in 1897.

At the University of Amsterdam Brouwer easily moved through the traditional mathematics curriculum and began some original studies on four-dimensional space that were published by...