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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 Pólya and Emmy Noether found that their left-wing political beliefs hindered their careers.
List of contents
Contents: Perception and Art - Criteria of Comparison - Function and Form - The Dialectic of Portraiture - The Self in the Portrait - Identity and Entity - William James and the Pragmatic Tradition - The Dialectic of the Self - Stein's Literary Portraits: «Cézanne», «Matisse», «Picasso», «If I Told Him», Picasso, Three Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
About the author
The Author: Allison Blizzard began her academic career in Literature and Foreign Languages (German and French) at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington in 1988. She received her M.A. in American Studies, German Literature and Philosophy in 1999 and her Ph.D. in 2003 from the Universität Duisburg-Essen in Duisburg. She has been a lecturer in the American Studies department there since 2000. Her main field of research deals with intermediality, especially in regard to Gertrude Stein and modernist art, but also in relation to cartoons and jazz music.
Report
«A wonderful taste of the lives of some great mathematicians and physicists who were either Jewish or of Jewish antecedents. The author asks searching questions about the combination of intellectual challenge, argument and upbringing that makes some ordinary Jewish families produce these brilliant scientific thinkers. We do not know the answers, but, reading these stories, we surely want to learn more.» (Rabbi Julia Neuberger)
«There is a certain nervousness about discussing the prominence of Jews in twentieth-century mathematics. This book does an excellent job in presenting an issue in the history of mathematics which is generally recognized and acknowledged by mathematicians, but hardly ever dealt with in print. A careful and authoritative account of the lives and contributions of his subjects.» (Professor Reuben Hersh, author of 'What is Mathematics, Really?')
