Whose Conjecture Did Van der Waerden Prove? Two Lives Between Two Wars: Issai Schur and Pierre Joseph Henry Baudet

Bartel L. van der Waerden credits “Baudet” [sic] with conjecturing the result about monochromatic arithmetic progressions. Decades later, Van der Waerden gives a most insightful story of the birth of his proof, which I have reproduced for you in Chap. 35 . As I enumerated there, the “Story of Creation” appears four times in German: twice in 1954 [Wae13], [Wae14], in 1965 [Wae16], posthumously in 1998 [Wae26]; and once in English in 1971 [Wae18]. In these publications, Van der Waerden extends the credit for the conjecture to “the Dutch mathematician Baudet,” still without the first name or even initials. Biographers of Van der Waerden faithfully follow him with crediting “Baudet” for the conjecture (see [Fre], [FTW], [Per], and [Bru1]).