Anita Burdman Feferman (–2015)

This is a straightforward biography of a remarkable person. The author's spouse worked with van Heijenoort and the author knew him first and then got his cooperation on this book. Her husband wrote an appendix, a summary of van Heijenoort's mathematical contributions. So this is a really thorough look at van Heijenoort's life.

He was born in northern France just before WW1, in a working class family. He was a mathematical whiz so he got scholarships to top schools... until, age 20 or so, he got enthralled by Marxism and Trotsky. So he quit school and went to work for Trotsky, following him from Turkey through France and Norway to Mexico. He left Trotsky's side not long before Trotsky was murdered, heading to the USA with his second wife. He was frustrated by the hair-splitting of the U.S. Trotsky group, and got back into mathematics.

A lot of the book is about van Heijenoort's relationships with his four wives. He was killed by his fourth wife, so one can understand the book as an attempt to understand how that came about.

Anyway, it's a very interesting track through the worlds of political and mathematical philosophy and how those take place in the contexts of the personal lives of the people who devote their lives to such things.… (mehr)