Amsterdam awarded him a Ph.D. for a thesis on algebraic geometry, supervised by Hendrick de Vries.

This work systematized an ample body of research by Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Richard Dedekind, and Emil Artin.

In July 1929 he married the sister of mathematician Franz Rellich, Camilla Juliana Anna, and they had three children.

[2] Following the war, Van der Waerden was repatriated to the Netherlands rather than returning to Leipzig (then under Soviet control), but struggled to find a position in the Dutch academic system, in part because his time in Germany made his politics suspect and in part due to Brouwer's opposition to Hilbert's school of mathematics.

In 1949, Van der Waerden became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1951 this was changed to a foreign membership.