Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, the founder of mathematical intuitionism, was born in 1881 in Overschie, near Rotterdam, the Netherlands. After attending schools in Medemblik, Hoorn, and Haarlem, he studied mathematics at the Municipal University of Amsterdam. He obtained his doctorate in 1907 for his thesis, Over de Grondslagen der Wiskunde (Amsterdam and Leipzig, 1907). He became privaat-docent at Amsterdam in 1909 and served as professor there from 1912 until his retirement in 1955. In the year that he became a professor he was elected to the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.

Besides contributions to the foundations of mathematics, Brouwer made major contributions to other areas of mathematics, in particular to topology, in which his most important publications date from the period 1909–1913. Combinatorial or algebraic topology came into being through discoveries of Henri Poincaré in the 1890s. A fundamental technique of Poincaré was to analyze figures into...