Birthday of Hermann Weyl (1885)

Hermann Weyl was a key figure in integrating mathematics and physics. He unified electromagnetism and gravity in a gauge theory (1918), which became the template for the Standard Model. He wrote classic texts on group theory, quantum mechanics, and the philosophy of mathematics. He proved the Weyl character formula for representations of Lie groups. He also contributed to analytic number theory (Weyl’s criterion for equidistribution). He was a student of Hilbert and a friend of Einstein. His work on symmetry and representation theory is now standard in particle physics.