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Göttingen was one of the most productive centers of mathematics (2019)
- mensetmanusman 2y agoAmericans typically don’t realize how lucky they were that World War II caused so much chaos in Europe and many of the best minds flooded to the US to kickstart the technology revolution and seed the economic powerhouse that it is today.
- SubjectToChange 2y agoIn terms of GPD the US was the world's largest economy well before World War I. Europe choosing to self-immolate twice before mid-century only served to widen the gap.
- mistrial9 2y agoreferences here are important.. it seems reductive framing to judge using economic units without acknowledging the interdependancies of real human living conditions and contexts, around the globe; secondly, unified national currency in the USA was not exactly a settled thing, not long before that era.. so measuring has to have some wrinkles in it, no?
- mighmi 2y ago> wrinkles They go the other way. The US surpassed the UK in per capita income in the 1880s. However, American yeomen farmers, factory workers etc. were far better off than (non-UK) Europeans even in 1800, hence millions of Europeans immigrating. By 1913, the American was still earning almost twice as much as the German or French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...
- WalterBright 2y ago"The United States has been the world's largest national economy in terms of GDP since around 1890." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
- jahewson 2y agoHuh? During the preceding decades the US invented the skyscraper, was home to the world’s tallest building, invented the light bulb, air conditioning, the airplane, the supermarket, and cotton candy!
- RadixDLT 2y agosome of the ideas were REHASHED from Europe, some were invented by Europe migrants
- Galanwe 2y agoIf you consider US versus any single European country yes. But we are talking about US getting brains from all over Europe. The combined GDP of the top 3 European countries (Germany, UK, France) pre WW1/2 is larger than the US, just as the GDP per capita of any individual European country pre WW1/2 is higher as well.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago> just as the GDP per capita of any individual European country pre WW1/2 is higher as well. Is that true? https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F400a9475-6f33-4239-96f2-7ec6d49dfa1f_2048x1338.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
- Galanwe 2y agoOh indeed, I looked at the GDP numbers and divided by the current population ratio, looks like it changed more than I thought across time.
- slicktux 2y agoThis is something I always say and amazed by. Just imagine; all the knowledge of transistors, radar and nuclear fission…All because of World Wars and, as you mentioned, all those great minds that came to the USA fleeing the war. Amazing
- ck45 2y agoNot only the ones that fled, there was also a huge brain drain after world war into both US and USSR, with von Braun probably being the most prominent.
- WalterBright 2y agoThey didn't flee the war. They fled the Nazi oppression before the war. See "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Once the war started, the borders were closed.
- racional 2y agoNot quite true in regard to border closures. It certainly became much more difficult to move around or out of Occupied Europe, but significant numbers of people managed to do so (via for example Portugal, Turkey and Vichy Africa).
- kmoser 2y agoIt was both. Many fled after the war, seeking better opportunities outside Germany. So many, in fact, that the Berlin Wall was built.
- blfr 2y agoAmericans were richer than even Brits back when they were still Brits The American colonies led Great Britain in purchasing power per capita from 1700, and possibly from 1650, until 1774, even counting slaves in the population The common view that American per capita income did not overtake that of Britain until the start of the 20th century appears to be off the mark by two centuries or longer. https://www.nber.org/papers/w19861 https://www.nber.org/papers/w19861
- meroes 2y agoOkay now do the 1880s.
- eska 2y agoeven counting slaves This remark should leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Obviously being immoral and exploiting human beings is an economic advantage. And excluding them in the census but benefitting from their work would be dehumanizing them even more.
- pfdietz 2y agoIt's an advantage for those doing the exploiting, but overall it's an economic disadvantage, if your per capita statistic includes the slaves when counting heads.
- eska 2y agoYes, educating all people will generate a bigger advantage in total. What I meant was that an individual will obviously make more money for themselves if they have free labor that they can exploit. So a society of N educated people will make less money than one of N people + S enslaved people, but a society of N + S educated people would make even more.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago> Americans typically don’t realize how lucky they were And, with all due respect, many people outside the US don't realise how lucky the best minds were that there was a stable, prosperous, (actively) welcoming society to bring these best minds out of the self-inflicted chaos of Europe.
- mantas 2y agoSelf-inflicted is a tad questionable. US played a big role in industrializing USSR. US also played a role in post-WWI peace deals which eventually lead to world war part II.
- kibwen 2y ago> US also played a role in post-WWI peace deals which eventually lead to world war part II. Woodrow Wilson's proposed peace deal didn't involve imposing harsh reparations on Germany. That was the doing of Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, who was under pressure to make Germany's reparations bill as large as possible as retribution for the war.
- bojan 2y agoWhile that is true, it is really important to add that that doesn't absolve the Germans one bit.
- kibwen 2y agoIndeed, though it's also true that the Germans should be held accountable for their own actions during the war, and not solely held responsible for WWI itself, which was a continent-wide effort.
- globalnode 2y agowhy should they be? none of the so called winners are held accountable for their actions. best we can do is forget it all and move on, otherwise it will forever be a case of finger pointing.
- mrtksn 2y agoAFAIK it was by design, the US policy makers actively worked for it. Also, I think the US will have something similar in reverse: Some of the brightest people educated in the US are going back to their home countries because they have visa troubles, social problems or simply better opportunities due to simple things like housing or structural things like the industry moved there. Also, judging by the enormous hate stream on the social media, many can be nudged to move out of the US to have some piece of mind. After Brexit, many EU citizens choose not to stay in UK even if they had that option because they have become a political subject and since they are not desperate why stay and risk it? China appear to be the next frontrunner in this. Many times, if you venture outside of the angloshpere you find out that somewhere(often in China) somebody is already doing it at the same level or better. There probably is going to be a correction at valuations. Cool stuff is happening in China and elsewhere and the USA is in a disarray with idelogies so extreme that are not too far of from the stuff that ruined Europe in the first half of the 1900s. Coup attempts, assassination attempts, election denial, mainstream targeting of group of people, rich looking into capitalising on all that when social disparity is so large that some live like kings others teetering - this is not a healthy society.
- drivebyhooting 2y agoAre you familiar with Chinese politics and society? It’s not a great Sino melting pot. The language barrier alone will stop Chinese cultural hegemony.
- mrtksn 2y agoThey have a lot of problems I'm reading about but there will be a void with the fall of the US from global superpower status and that void wouldn't be left unattended. Anyway, with the banning of TikTok it's pretty clear to me: No more global companies without hard tech. The US used to be the bastion of free global trade but they resigned. Anything that relies on things like network effect or branding will become local because countries can enforce it. If some country has the engineering capacity to build a website where people post texts and media and others like and share that media then the American version wouldn't be allowed. Therefore, the US economy will become as powerful as having about 300M citizens, not as global power. China has huge number of citizens, they win by default as long as they can do the hard tech good enough and they apparently can do that. US embargoes only pushed them to make their local alternatives and they made them pretty good, whatever they make they make it for over a billion people. EU has a version of this problem, that is they don't have one large chunk of people who speak the same language and trade on the same rules. The trading on the same rules is something that EU fixed a lot but the EU is still fragmented and this makes EU companies anaemic because they can't get huge without going global. When the global trade is gone, the US will have the same issue(probably still better situation than EU but much worse than China).
- Goettingenknowr 2y agoIt seems like Americans understand just fine how much they benefited from post-war prosperity and the destruction of Europe WWII brought with it.
- pfdietz 2y agoWe'd have been better off without the war, though, in absolute terms. So much destruction and wasted output.
- tagyro 2y agoNow they're happy to trump up some BS about "America innovates, Europe regulates" It's easy to "innovate" when you're starting from a "clean slate".
- fsckboy 2y agoHere's some innovative American peanut butter to go with your pure jelly: We didn't trump up anything about American individualism, ingenuity and innovation. Rather, a visiting European, de Toqueville, wrote about it extensively as early as 1835. De la démocratie en Amérique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America He also said "...I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, ... to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply,—to the superiority of their women." "Tocqueville noted that religion played a leading role in American life in the 1830s, due to its being constitutionally separated from government. Far from objecting to this situation, he observed that Americans found this disestablishment quite satisfactory, in contrast to France, with its outright antagonism between avowedly religious people and supporters of democracy."
- tagyro 2y agono jelly here Happy to have my privacy, no company snooping on me 's all good, man :)
- inglor_cz 2y ago"It's easy to "innovate" when you're starting from a "clean slate"." This is an interesting remark. It seems that countries like Estonia or Poland, which significantly overhauled their systems in the 1990s, are more innovative than Italy, Germany or France, whose systems are much older and somewhat ossified / clogged with bureaucracy. But the US system is even older, and it still produces good results. Heck, the UK system is ancient, and the UK has a lot of innovation going on, both in tech and biotech.
- tagyro 2y ago
- renewiltord 2y ago[flagged]
- LtWorf 2y ago[flagged]
- renewiltord 2y ago[flagged]
- LtWorf 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoPlease don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 2y agoCan you please stop posting ideological and/or nationalistic and/or other flamewar comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, destroys what it is for, the site guidelines ask you to avoid it, and you've unfortunately been doing it a whole lot lately. In fact it looks like you're crossing into trolling. We have to ban accounts that post this way, so it would be good if you'd please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- renewiltord 2y agoThanks for the warning. Will comply.
- kkfx 2y agoI suggest another vision: how many talents, students with potential, teachers etc we ALL lost in WWI and WWII? You know back than in most countries serving in the army was mandatory.
- dyauspitr 2y agoAnd it continues to this day with the Indian and Chinese immigrants to the US.
- dredmorbius 2y agoI'm also constantly reminded that there was a counterflow brain-drain, from the US to Europe, both before and after WWII, largely of African-Americans fleeing oppression not just in the US South, but throughout the country. James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Nina Simone. Others who didn't necessarily emigrate to Europe did spend much time there: Paul Robeson, John Coltrane, Lillian Smith, Alain Locke, and Ethel Waters amongst them. You can also see patterns in movement of creative and technical talent within the US. There is of course the Great Migration from the South to northern, mostly industrial cities. California collected creative and technical talent from across the country, to a much greater extent than already established and notable Eastern states with large cities (New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, ...). In some specific cases (the establishment of Hollywood), we know that lax patent enforcement and ready escape to Mexico was a strong draw for the early film industry against Edison's lawyers. I suspect that in addition to the much-ballyhooed physical climate, reduced social strictures, ease of land development, and rapidly-growing metro regions particularly near Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, contributed. There's also of course the WWII and post-war / Cold War military economy which played a tremendous role. You also saw organisations such as RAND moving wholesale to the West in the 1950s, for a combination of factors: more space, closer to major aerospace operations. Entire families were shipped west by railroad. My hypothesis is that intellectual and creative talent seek freedom, in both positive (opportunity) and avoidance of negative (oppression, suppression, abuse) senses. As much as we talk of capital being more mobile than labour, creative labour being concentrated in a few individuals is especially mobile, and quite sensitive to conditions of oppression. One obvious risk shares some parallels with a paradox of transportation infrastructure: as transportation improves, formerly greenfield / undeveloped regions become developed and land values explode such that further improvements in transportation become exceedingly expensive, both financially and politically. In the intellectual and creative realms, moats and ramparts, institutional rigidities, commercial and political allegiances, etc., emerge, which actively retard further progress. The challenge is in identifying where new regions (in the physical and geographic sense) of opportunity might be emerging.
- 77pt77 2y agoTurns out being surrounded by two massive oceans and friendly and much weaker nations is a great advantage, An advantage that hasn't been put ti much use because once could make a strong point that things have been stagnant for 60 years.
- hamster77 2y ago[flagged]
- highfrequency 2y ago“The center of mathematics shifted quickly during the Nazi era and in the wake of World War II. Courant, Weyl and others helped move it to the U.K. and the U.S., where most of the top-ranked mathematics programs are located today.” One of many instances in history where a city’s rise to prominence was kicked off by political turmoil or religious persecution in the leading city of the previous era. For example: immigration of merchants and weavers from Belgium to the Netherlands following Spanish occupation and the Fall of Antwerp, Huguenot emigration from France during the French Wars of Religion, etc. When trying to answer the question of why a certain city/country/company started becoming successful, it’s often a good starting point to ask who moved there and what skills and experience did they bring, rather than mistaking it as a static group of individuals. Another corollary: it really pays to be a tolerant, stable and welcoming country. When other countries do stupid things you can benefit from an inflow of talent and experience.
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoAlso it's probably important that the immigrants come after a turmoil, so their lives and research are reorganized, getting rid of political/hierarchical baggage and starting fresh with other top minds.
- est31 2y agoAnother example is Bavaria, which used to be a poorly developed place until the post-ww2 immigration of Germans from the east happened.
- crossroadsguy 2y agoI wonder in today's times what country(ies) such scholars would move to if they were affected by extreme right wing persecution in their own countries, seeing that the wave is strong almost everywhere, especially in the country that was pretty much the the destination for last migration i.e starting 1930s from Europe.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoWasn't Israel invented to provide that? It's hard to think of a more effective immigration policy than "free entry for Jews".
- stratocumulus0 2y agoHaving graduated from a Polish university and having done a semester in Germany I can say that at least the people who attended university in Germany had an idea what are they interested in and what do they want to do after graduating, while me and all my peers in Poland just went to college because of societal pressure and kept jumping the hurdles put up by academic staff who knew no better and were taught that academia is just about about bootlicking your way up while pretending to teach.
- nikeee 2y agoIt's not just mathematics but physics as well. For example Paul Dirac, Max Born, Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Heisenberg, John von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Max Planck, and Wolfgang Pauli either studied, did research or had a profession in Göttingen
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoThe Nazis destroyed Germanys progress
- GasTheKayaks88 2y ago[flagged]
- kubrickslair 2y agoYes, this may be relevant: In 1934, David Hilbert, by then a grand old man of German mathematics, was dining with Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister of education. Rust asked, “How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?” Hilbert replied, “There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.”
- nwj 2y agoIt's really crazy how all these people overlap at Gottingen in the 1920s. Take Oppenheimer, for instance. He transfers to Göttingen from Cambridge in 1926 (after a relatively miserable time at the Cavendish labs studying under J.J. Thompson). He earns his PhD at Göttingen quickly. By September 1927, he's back in the USA on a teaching fellowship with Caltech. So, Oppenheimer isn't at Göttingen for very long - not even 2 years! But in that brief time, he meet Max Born, James Franck, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner who are also all there. Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi had moved to other institutions by 1926, and Edward Teller doesn't get there until 1930 - but it's plausible that the Göttingen connection (and their relationship to Max Born) are how Oppenheimer meets them.
- api 2y agoIt’s amazing how much America has benefited from brain drain from totalitarian countries. We should keep it up.
- ausbah 2y agous benefits from brain drain from developing nations as well, which isn’t as cool
- lkrubner 2y agoSadly, this article does not answer the question of why such a concentration of brilliance developed at Göttingen. If we wanted to build a new Göttingen, how would we do it? What factors allowed Göttingen to exist? For most of a century, Germany was leading in most scientific and academic fields, but what allowed this? When we think of the Golden Age of physics we are thinking of a cultural event that had its center in Germany, but why? And why has Germany been so dull and flat ever since? Clearly, building a liberal democracy is not enough to ensure such a cultural event. Much of Germany was liberal but non-democratic during its golden age, as other places were, but what made Germany special at this time?
- chunkyguy 2y agothis sounds like a good explanation: > University of Göttingen had more academic freedom than generations past. They were promised intellectual autonomy and freedom from close religious supervision. Instead, they were recruited solely to advance knowledge and carry out original research. The education of students was also more egalitarian than it had been previously in Europe, as both rich and poor were admitted and trained.
- nextos 2y agoAfter working at several universities, and interacting with lots of institutions on both sides of the pond, I think this freedom issue is also what makes American Academia more successful than European Academia these days. In Europe, academic freedom is limited because the structure we have resembles a very wide pyramid, with some minor differences across fields and countries. Junior professorships are more rare and more difficult to get into. The result is always the same, a full professor that controls his field locally and lots of expendable badly-paid postdocs working for him. Access to funding is also much more limited, which in turn restricts the capacity of said postdocs to pursue their own ideas, even while working under the umbrella of the professor. In the US, tenure-track assistant professorships are much more common and requirements to apply are more flexible. Seed grants for junior faculty members are also common and not too hard to obtain. The result is a lot more freedom to explore. Basically, it is the same issue as with technology. EU suffers from over-regulation and control by some rent-seeking elites.
- ufo 2y agoOne interesting annecdote: combinatory logic uses single letter names for all its combinators (S, K, I, etc). Those names are all in german, despite being invented by a Russian jew (Moses Shoenfinkel) and further developed by an american (Haskell Curry). Both worked at Göttingen at the time.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> despite being invented by a Russian jew (Moses Shoenfinkel) Interestingly, that name doesn't look particularly Russian. German Jews often possess incredibly Slavic names like "Moskowitz", suggesting an unclear boundary between being "German" vs "Russian".
- arrosenberg 2y agoIt’s most likely because Russian and Steppe jews arrived from the Rhine area after the black plague.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoSo, "German Jews" come from Russia, but "Russian Jews" come from Germany? Moskowitz in particular is the German spelling of a Russian patronymic identifying the man's father as having a Yiddish name. That's several cycles of transferring between Russia and Germany.
- arrosenberg 2y agoYes, in fact! Ashkenazi Jews were diaspora’d to the Rhine by the Romans and to Poland by middle age German polities for “causing the black plague”. The Russians conquered the areas of the Steppe they settled. There was an exodus of Russian Jews to the west during the pogroms of the early 1900s, with many (including my great grandparents) settling in Austria and Germany.
- photochemsyn 2y agoIt's a bit amusing that the article stops with the 1930s exodus and entirely ignores the 1940s exodus to the USA organized by US intelligence agencies under Operation Paperclip. It's true not many of this latter group were involved in pure mathematics, I suppose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
- kmoser 2y agoOperation Paperclip doesn't seem to have been specific to Göttingen so it's only tangentially related to the topic.
- croes 2y agoI wonder how Nazi-Germany would have worked out without antisemitism.
- samatman 2y agoIt would have had a different name. Antisemitism was the central pillar of National Socialism.
- ahartmetz 2y agoNo, not really. It was a dumb ideology, but not as dumb as "points 1-10: Jews bad". Like almost any ideology that went anywhere, it had positive things that it valued, and these were more foundational than things (people...) that it wanted to remove or destroy.
- Tainnor 2y agoThe core of Nazism was that it viewed humanity as a struggle to the death between different peoples (such as Germanic people and Slavs), and that elements such as Jews, disabled people, homosexuals, communists, were like a parasite slowly killing the German people if not destroyed. It's really one of the most destructive and self-defeating ideologies ever, much more so than e.g. fascism in Italy and Spain.
- samatman 2y agoYes, really. I can't recommend reading Mein Kampf, because it sucks, but it's essential to have an informed opinion on this subject.
- ponector 2y agoThere is a such example: USSR. Stalin is not so different to Hitler.
- racional 2y agoHe was similarly evil of course. But he was a totally different creature (and came to and held power in ways very different) from that other guy. That said, one can certainly imagine a NS movement that left the Jews alone and concentrated its wrath the other usual suspects. It might not have achieved quite the fiery intensity, or had quite the degree of hypnotic effect that it had on so many people that it did without the singular choice of a primary "hate object" that it made Resonating as it did with centuries of psychic undercurrents in regard to the position of the Jewish minority in European society.
- pkoird 2y agoI suppose a similar argument could be made about Bell Labs, where much of the digital foundations were invented.
- graycat 2y agoAs I recall, Bell Labs had a license to print money -- they had a government permitted monopoly on the US voice telephone network. So, for one effort, they saw that for the electronic signal amplifiers they needed, vacuum tubes, amazing and powerful, were too big, hot, expensive, and delicate so invented transistors, patented them, and, realizing the power, gave the patent to the world. Today if we had to pay a penny a transistor, then the 8 core AMD 4.0 GHz processor I bought for $115 (with HOW many transistors?) would cost -- hmm, could buy a house, a big one! So, net, Bell Labs was a big success for Bell, its stockholders, the US voice telephone network, the future of technology, the economy, and the standard of living of the world. How to do that again? Hmm ....
- inglor_cz 2y agoApple rolls in money in a way very similar to Bell, even though it doesn't have a legal monopoly.
- ekun 2y agoI worked with an older German man who was a consultant on a research project that I was working on in graduate school. He was born in Gottingen and told stories how as a kid he got to test his paper airplanes in their wind tunnels with these famous scientists.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amai 2y agoGöttingen became a center of math clearly because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss, the Princeps mathematicorum. His influence was crucial for the development of math and science in Germany of the 19th century.
- whotheheckknows 2y ago'Want more, get more' (related Comic it's in german... but ...who may know for what's good... I'm a non native english speaker...) https://shorturl.at/guck2 https://shorturl.at/guck2 regards...
- bikenaga 2y agoConstance Reid's wonderful biography "Hilbert" [New York: Springer-Verlay, 1983; ISBN: 0-387-04999-1] describes a lot of the history of mathematics in Göttingen. It may be the finest mathematical biography I've ever read. Hermann Weyl wrote an article on Hilbert's mathematical work (from the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society [pdf]): https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1944-50-09/S0002-9904-1944-08178-0/S0002-9904-1944-08178-0.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1944-50-09/S0002-9904-1944... Hilbert's mathematical range was enormous. Among many things, he was known for his 23 "Hilbert problems" which influenced a lot of subsequent mathematics: Benjamin Yandell, "The Honors Class - Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers". Natick, MA: A. K. Peters, 2002. [ISBN:1-56881-141-1] There's been significant progress on some of the problems since Yandell's book, but it's still a good introduction.
- fsckboy 2y ago>Bernhard Riemann, the head of mathematics at Göttingen from 1859 to 1866, invented Riemannian geometry, which paved the way for Einstein’s future work on relativity. Felix Klein, the chair of mathematics from 1886 to 1913, was the first to describe the Klein bottle,... ...paving the way for Cliff Stoll!
- brindlejim 2y agoThe political changes that lead to the talent exodus from Goettingen are not, in fact, so different from the ideological oaths required by much of US academia now, and seem to me to be a great way to eliminate our centers of intellectual brilliance.
- xzxa 2y ago[dead]