Andries Mac Leod

Who was Andries Mac Leod?

Andries Hugo Donald Mac Leod was a Belgian-Swedish philosopher and mathematician.

Andries Mac Leod was born in Ledeberg, a suburb of Ghent, as a son of Julius Mac Leod, a botanist and professor at Ghent University, and of Fanny Mac Leod born Maertens, who was translator from English into Dutch of two books by Kropotkin.

While Mac Leod was attending the atheneum in Ghent, he already got interested in philosophy and he was one of the founders of a Wijsgerige Kring there. One of the other members of this circle was Marcel Minnaert, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship.

Mac Leod studied mathematics and physics at Ghent University, where he obtained his doctorate in July 1914 by submitting a thesis on a problem in fluid mechanics. Immediately afterwards he travelled for holidays to Lapland in Sweden. There he learnt that the German army had invaded Belgium on 4 August 1914. He decided to stay in Sweden. He got a job in the large mathematical library of Gösta Mittag-Leffler in Djursholm near Stockholm. He also attended the seminars of the philosopher Adolph Phalén at Uppsala University. He was deeply impressed by Phalén's work.