"In 1933 Landau was dismissed from his [University of Göttingen] chair on the grounds of his race. An important colleague... Ludwig Bieberbach ...wrote the following lines in a treatise on Personality structure and mathematical creativity: "In this way... the ultimate reason behind the courageous rejection which the students at Göttingen University meted out to a great mathematician, Edmund Landau, was that his un-German style in research and teaching had become intolerable to German sensitivities. A people which has seen how alien desires for dominion are gnawing at its identity, how enemies of the people are working to impose their alien ways on it, must reject teachers of a type alien to it." The English mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy... responded to Bieberbach... "There are many of us, many English and many Germans, who said things during the (First) War which we scarcely meant and are sorry to remember now. Anxiety for one's own position, dread of falling behind the rising torrent of folly, determination at all costs not to be outdone, may be natural if not particularly heroic excuses. Prof. Bieberbach's reputation excludes such explanation for his utterances; and I find myself driven to the more uncharitable conclusion that he really believes them true.""
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Atheists from EnglandFellows of the Royal SocietyUniversity of Cambridge facultyMathematicians from EnglandNon-fiction authors from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Jörg Arndt & Christoph Haenel, Pi - Unleashed (2012)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
G. H. Hardy
Godfrey Harold Hardy FRS (7 February 1877 – 1 December 1947) was an English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis. In biology, he is known for the Hardy–Weinberg principle, a basic principle of population genetics. Hardy is usually known by those outside the field of mathematics for his 1940 essay A Mathematician's Apology, often considered one of the best insights into the mind of a working mathematician written for the layperson. He had a long col
38 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by G. H. Hardy →
Related Quotes
"If I knew I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores."
"If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow …"
"He could remember the idiosyncrasies of numbers in an almost uncanny way. It was Littlewood who said that every posit…"
"I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All ph…"
"… there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who ex…"
"If a man has any genuine talent, he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full."
"Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who…"
"Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immo…"
"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it…"
"Mathematicians have constructed a very large number of different systems of geometry, Euclidean or non-Euclidean, of …"