A companion publication to the international exhibition "Transcending Tradition: Jewish Mathematicians in German-Speaking Academic Culture", the catalogue explores the working lives and activities of Jewish mathematicians in German-speaking countries during the period between the legal and political emancipation of the Jews in the 19th century and their persecution in Nazi Germany. It highlights the important role Jewish mathematicians played in all areas of mathematical culture during the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic, and recalls their emigration, flight or death after 1933.
Historian David E. Rowe captures the rich tapestry of mathematical creativity in this collection of essays from the “Years Ago” column of The Mathematical Intelligencer. With topics ranging from ancient Greek mathematics to modern relativistic cosmology, this collection conveys the impetus and spirit of Rowe’s various and many-faceted contributions to the history of mathematics. Centered on the Göttingen mathematical tradition, these stories illuminate important facets of mathematical activity often overlooked in other accounts. Six sections place the essays in chronological and thematic order, beginning with new introductions that contextualize each section. The essays that follow recount episodes relating to the section’s overall theme. All of the essays in this collection, with the exception of two, appeared over the course of more than 30 years in The Mathematical Intelligencer. Based largely on archival and primary sources, these vignettes offer unusual insights into behind-the-scenes events. Taken together, they aim to show how Göttingen managed to attract an extraordinary array of talented individuals, several of whom contributed to the development of a new mathematical culture during the first decades of the twentieth century.
As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focussing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism—as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism—and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.
Although she was famous as the "mother of modern algebra," Emmy Noether’s life and work have never been the subject of an authoritative scientific biography. Emmy Noether – Mathematician Extraordinaire represents the most comprehensive study of this singularly important mathematician to date. Focusing on key turning points, it aims to provide an overall interpretation of Noether’s intellectual development while offering a new assessment of her role in transforming the mathematics of the twentieth century. Hermann Weyl, her colleague before both fled to the United States in 1933, fully recognized that Noether’s dynamic school was the very heart and soul of the famous Göttingen community. Beyond her immediate circle of students, Emmy Noether’s lectures and seminars drew talented mathematicians from all over the world. Four of the most important were B.L. van der Waerden, Pavel Alexandrov, Helmut Hasse, and Olga Taussky. Noether’s classic papers on ideal theory inspired van der Waerden to recast his research in algebraic geometry. Her lectures on group theory motivated Alexandrov to develop links between point set topology and combinatorial methods. Noether’s vision for a new approach to algebraic number theory gave Hasse the impetus to pursue a line of research that led to the Brauer–Hasse–Noether Theorem, whereas her abstract style clashed with Taussky’s approach to classical class field theory during a difficult time when both were trying to find their footing in a foreign country. Although similar to Proving It Her Way: Emmy Noether, a Life in Mathematics, this lengthier study addresses mathematically minded readers. Thus, it presents a detailed analysis of Emmy Noether’s work with Hilbert and Klein on mathematical problems connected with Einstein’s theory of relativity. These efforts culminated with her famous paper "Invariant Variational Problems," published one year before she joined the Göttingen faculty in 1919.
The name Emmy Noether is one of the most celebrated in the history of mathematics. A brilliant algebraist and iconic figure for women in modern science, Noether exerted a strong influence on the younger mathematicians of her time and long thereafter; today, she is known worldwide as the "mother of modern algebra." Drawing on original archival material and recent research, this book follows Emmy Noethers career from her early years in Erlangen up until her tragic death in the United States. After solving a major outstanding problem in Einsteins theory of relativity, she was finally able to join the Göttingen faculty in 1919. Proving It Her Way offers a new perspective on an extraordinary career, first, by focusing on important figures in Noethers life and, second, by showing how she selflessly promoted the careers of several other talented individuals. By exploring her mathematical world, it aims to convey the personality and impact of a remarkable mathematician who literally changed the face of modern mathematics, despite the fact that, as a woman, she never held a regular professorship. Written for a general audience, this study uncovers the human dimensions of Noethers key relationships with a younger generation of mathematicians. Thematically, the authors took inspiration from their cooperation with the ensemble portraittheater Vienna in producing the play "Diving into Math with Emmy Noether." Four of the young mathematicians portrayed in Proving It Her Way - B.L. van der Waerden, Pavel Alexandrov, Helmut Hasse, and Olga Taussky - also appear in "Diving into Math.".
The Development of Mathematics Between the World Wars traces the transformation of scientific life within mathematical communities during the interwar period in Central and Eastern Europe, specifically in Germany, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Throughout the book, in-depth mathematical analyses and examples are included for the benefit of the reader.World War I heavily affected academic life. In European countries, many talented researchers and students were killed in action and scientific activities were halted to resume only in the postwar years. However, this inhibition turned out to be a catalyst for the birth of a new generation of mathematicians, for the emergence of new ideas and theories and for the surprising creation of new and outstanding scientific schools.The final four chapters are not restricted to Central and Eastern Europe and deal with the development of mathematics between World War I and World War II. After describing the general state of mathematics at the end of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century, three case studies dealing with selected mathematical disciplines are presented (set theory, potential theory, combinatorics), in a way accessible to a broad audience of mathematicians as well as historians of mathematics.
This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present.
This proceedings volume collects the stories of mathematicians and scientists who have spent and developed parts of their careers and life in countries other than those of their origin. The reasons may have been different in different periods but were often driven by political or economic circumstances: The lack of suitable employment opportunities in their home countries, adverse political systems, and wars have led to the emigration of scientists. The volume shows that these movements have played an important role in spreading scientific knowledge and have often changed the scientific landscape, tradition and future of studies and research fields. The book analyses in particular: aspects of Euler’s, Lagrange’s and Boscovich’s scientific biographies, migrations of scientists from France, Spain and Greece to Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and from Russia to France in the twentieth century, exiles from Italy before the Italian Risorgimento, migrations inside Europe and the escape of mathematicians from Nazi-fascist Europe, between the two World Wars, as well as the mobility of experts around the world. It includes selected contributions from the symposium In Foreign Lands: The Migration of Scientists for Political or Economic Reasons held at the Conference of the International Academy of the History of Science in Athens (September 2019).
This two volume set presents over 50 of the most groundbreaking contributions of Menahem M Schiffer. All of the reprints of Schiffer’s works herein have extensive annotation and invited commentaries, giving new clarity and insight into the impact and legacy of Schiffer's work. A complete bibliography and brief biography make this a rounded and invaluable reference.
The volume satisfies the researcher with an interest in exile as an historical and literary phenomenon. The first eight essays focus on the British and Irish dimension. The following four widen the discussion to encompass continental Europe. And finally, the historical dimension is deepened with contributions the marginalisation of the mass emigration of the Jews within German memory, and the ‘exile’ of princesses.
The eighth and final volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the period from roughly 1815–2000. Exploring the breadth and depth of Jewish societies and their manifold engagements with aspects of the modern world, it offers overviews of modern Jewish history, as well as more focused essays on political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural developments. The first part presents a series of interlocking surveys that address the history of diverse areas of Jewish settlement. The second part is organized around the emancipation. Here, chapter themes are grouped around the challenges posed by and to this elemental feature of Jewish life in the modern period. The third part adopts a thematic approach organized around the category 'culture', with the goal of casting a wide net in terms of perspectives, concepts and topics. The final part then focuses on the twentieth century, offering readers a sense of the dynamic nature of Judaism and Jewish identities and affiliations.
This book explores facets of Otto Neugebauer's career, his impact on the history and practice of mathematics, and the ways in which his legacy has been preserved or transformed in recent decades, looking ahead to the directions in which the study of the history of science will head in the twenty-first century. Neugebauer, more than any other scholar of recent times, shaped the way we perceive premodern science. Through his scholarship and influence on students and collaborators, he inculcated both an approach to historical research on ancient and medieval mathematics and astronomy through precise mathematical and philological study of texts, and a vision of these sciences as systems of knowledge and method that spread outward from the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, crossing cultural boundaries and circulating over a tremendous geographical expanse of the Old World from the Atlantic to India.
