Abstract
After having been released from my captivity “outside the Geneva Conventions,” I had to face the question of what to study and where. I was always strongly attracted to mathematics but my grandmother thought I should become a physicist. Fine, but where to study physics in those days? In Göttingen perhaps, where several great physicists were in residence, Nobelists Max Planck, Max von Laue, and Werner Heisenberg whose quantum mechanics we youngsters were all eager to understand. We were of course duly impressed by Albert Einstein’s relativity but it contained no great mysteries for us. We had accepted that space was curved, simultaneity and the “ether” were exposed as figments of the imagination and mass and energy were shown by Albert to be equivalent: E = mc 2.
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- 1.
After I got my degree of Diplomphysiker on 19 December 1951, one of our co-eds appeared, out of nowhere so to speak, in my home town to spend a night with me. This kind of forwardness has happened to me only one more time—shortly after I got my Ph.D. degree. (I never realized that fresh academic degrees were that seductive. Ius primae noctis?)
- 2.
The prime number 17 is a so-called Fermat Prime. The only known Fermat Primes are 3, 5, 17, 257, and 65,537. Fermat thought that all numbers of the form 2m + 1, where m is a power of 2, are prime. But Euler proved him wrong, showing that for m = 32 the resulting number is divisible by 641 and therefore not prime. (Try it. A modest-size pocket calculator will do! But to have “guessed” that 641 was a divisor of 4,294,967,297 required a mathematical genius like Euler.)
- 3.
I once heard it said that mathematician Emmy Noether was like a Nobelist in physics or chemistry. But that is a gross understatement. In the twentieth century some 400 physicists and chemists were awarded a Nobel Prize but Emmy clearly ranked among the top ten mathematicians of the century. She had to flee Germany in 1933 and died 2 years later as a professor at Bryn Mawr. I recently (14 February 2007) succeeded in locating one of her surviving relatives, her nephew Herman Noether, in Summit, New Jersey, from whom I could retrieve some documents of his Aunt Emmy for the Göttingen Academy Commission charged with assembling the Nachlässe (scientific estates) of famous mathematicians.
- 4.
Her previous boyfriend, she told me, likened protected congress to taking a shower in a rain coat.
- 5.
Meyer, ever the gentleman, once had every reason to be angry at me: I had “borrowed” the Institute’s projector to show some slides at home. When I brought it back the next morning, he had already been waiting for it because he needed it for his lecture. Then, upon plugging the projector in, the light bulb exploded with a big bang. Meyer was obviously “boiling,” but all he said was “Diese Lampe bezahlen Sie!” (You’ll have to pay for this bulb.)
- 6.
Der 17. Juni was soon declared a national holiday in West Germany, and called Tag der deutschen Einheit (Day of German Unity) implying that the East German workers had taken to the streets (and faced Russian tanks) not to protest for better working conditions but for Wiedervereinigung (Re-unification).—This was an obscene lie on the part of the West. If you voiced any doubt of this interpretation you were labelled unpatriotic (Einheitsverleugner).
- 7.
One avid reader, Kristina Lerman, named my book as one of the few she would take with her to a coffee shop to keep her company. Some company!
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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Schroeder, M.R. (2015). The University of Göttingen. In: Xiang, N., Sessler, G. (eds) Acoustics, Information, and Communication. Modern Acoustics and Signal Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05660-9_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05660-9_19
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