Driven to innovate : a century of Jewish mathematicians and physicists
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Driven to innovate : a century of Jewish mathematicians and physicists
Peter Lang, 2009
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-300) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Ioan James celebrates the extraordinary contribution made by Jewish people in mathematics and physics, from the mathematician Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, to distinguished nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Niels Bohr. He tells the life-stories of thirty-five men and women, born in the nineteenth century, who were at the forefront of research in the closely related fields of mathematics and physics, often in the face of various kinds of anti-Semitism. Some were caught up in the trauma of the Nazi accession to power in Germany and the Second World War. Wolfgang Pauli, described as 'greater than Einstein' by his contemporary Max Born, became a German national following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 but was able to escape to the United States for the duration of the war. Already hampered by anti-Semitism in his native Poland, logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski found himself stranded in the USA at the outbreak of war and did not see his wife and sons until the war's end. The Italian mathematician Vito Volterra publicly opposed Mussolini's Fascist regime at considerable personal risk.
Others such as George Polya and Emmy Noether found that their left-wing political beliefs hindered their careers.
Table of Contents
Contents: Historical Background - Jews in Academia - Some Forerunners - Years of Opportunity: Carl Jacobi, J. J. Sylvester, Gotthold Eisenstein, Leopold Kronecker, Georg Cantor, Albert Michelson, Hertha Ayrton - Years of Success: Heinrich Hertz, Vito Volterra, Hermann Minkowski, Jacques Hadamard, Felix Hausdorff, Tullio Levi-Civita, Edmund Landau - Troubled Times: Lise Meitner, Max Dehn, Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, Abram Ioffe, Emmy Noether, James Franck - Emigrants and Immigrants: Max Born, Solomon Lefschetz, Niels Bohr, George Polya, Richard Courant, Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch, Franz Simon - Modern Times: Heinz Hopf, Norbert Wiener, Igor Ivgenievitch Tamm, Oscar Zariski, Wolfgang Pauli, Dennis Gabor, Alfred Tarski.
by "Nielsen BookData"
