Oswald Veblen Profiled in Princeton Magazine on His 140th Birthday

On this, the summer of Oswald Veblen's 140th birthday, the story of his life and legacy made it into the radiant glossy pages of the Princeton Magazine. An article entitled The Extraordinary Legacy of Oswald Veblen by Don Gilpin captures the breadth and depth of Veblen's 80 years on the planet, most of it spent in Princeton, first at Princeton University and then at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Gilpin weaves in quotes from Steve Batterson's article, “The Vision, Insight, and Influence of Oswald Veblen," and from Princeton University President Eisgruber's 2020 State of the University report.

What we've come to know is that Princeton would not be Princeton, and the Institute would not be the Institute, without the vision and quiet persistence of this man. He brought something of his Norwegian ancestry and midwestern egalitarian sensibilities eastward from Iowa, while his wife to be, Elizabeth Richardson, brought her charm, tea, and love of gardening westward from England. They met in Princeton and together they changed the world for the better, near and far.

The article also tells the story of our nonprofit, the Friends of Herrontown Woods, which is applying a dose of Veblen's quiet persistence to restore and revivify the Veblens' physical legacy--the house, cottage and 95 acres they left behind for the public to enjoy. We now have the lease the article mentioned, and can proceed with repairs to the 1931 house and the 1875 cottage, both of which have been patiently awaiting the attention they deserve.

The photos in the article are courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study archives, including this photo of the Veblens at the American Mathematical Society's 1950 International Congress, presided over by Veblen at age 70, as he was retiring from the IAS. Now, twice as distant in time from Veblen's birth in the hill country of Iowa, Don Gilpin's article is a fitting tribute to a legacy that keeps on giving.

Building a House, Building Mathematics

When Oswald Veblen arrived in Princeton in 1905, having completed his PhD in mathematics in Chicago, he may have envisioned American academics much like this representation of the house in which his grandparents and 8 children had spent the winter of 1866 on the Minnesota prairie. For that first winter in what could barely be called a house, they lived in the basement, surrounded by a foundation and sheltered by a temporary roof. A large fireplace stood at one end, a cooking stove at the other, with a well dug in the middle. They made it through the winter, but in Oswald's grandfather Thomas's mind was the two-story house they would ultimately live in.

By the time winter arrived the next year, in 1867, Thomas had built the shell of the house, which he would elaborate on until it reached its final form in 1870, ten years before Oswald was born.

American mathematics in 1905 was like a basement on the frontier compared to the glorious universities in Europe that gave Oswald a model for what could be realized over time. Grandfather Thomas built his house in four years. Mathematics in America took longer, reaching parity with Europe and a golden age in Princeton in the 1930s.

Along the way, surely drawing on his grandfather's life spent building a series of four midwestern farms from the ground up, Oswald contributed to the evolution of mathematics, intellectually and institutionally, bringing talented mathematicians together and even designing the building that Princeton's mathematics department and the new Institute for Advanced Study would both call home in the 1930s--Fine Hall.

In an article by William C. Melton entitled "Thorstein Veblen and the Veblens", from which these photos are taken, the descriptions of Oswald's grandfather give a sense of an open and flexible mind, a bottomless work ethic, and family generosity. Thomas was "actively interested in innovations." He and wife Kari "were virtual dynamos until late in their lives." Thomas had a "penchant for making continual modifications when these seemed desirable as well as his evident lack of commitment to conventional construction norms-including straight lines, ninety-degree angles, and such things." Most telling, given Oswald's initiative to find a safe haven in the U.S. for displaced European scholars in the 1930s, is a description of his grandparents on the Minnesota frontier as "extremely generous in opening their doors to newly arrived immigrants (including relatives) who needed a place to stay."

Oswald, who had no children, inherited these qualities and applied them to making mathematicians and mathematics his family and his home.

Shambaugh -- Some Improbable Veblen Connections

This week, the local public library is hosting a workshop in which "participants will write a letter of appreciation and praise to a deserving person in their life." Maybe there's something in the air, with the close of the second decade of the 21st Century, because I had just sent off a couple letters expressing gratitude for professors who had inspired me long ago, in another place and another century.

One was a music professor whose courses on 18th Century counterpoint helped me develop as a composer. His name was Elwood Derr, and using the same simple research approach that has brought to light so much information about the Veblens and the Whiton-Stuarts, I quickly found out that he had passed away, that he had once studied with Carl Orff of Carmina Burana fame, and that his wife might still be alive.

I also noticed that Professor Derr's middle name was Shambaugh. Out of curiosity, knowing from research on Jesse Paulmier Whiton-Stuart just how meaningful a name can be, I decided to search for significant Shambaughs that might be related. Two popped up in an internet search. Remarkably, both were contemporaries of Oswald Veblen and both heralded from his home state of Iowa. What are the chances of that? One was Benjamin Franklin Shambaugh--a very important sounding name.

Benjamin Franklin Shambaugh

A search for a Veblen-Shambaugh connection brought up a list of faculty from 1900 at the University of Iowa. The screenshot shows Veblen's father and Benjamin Shambaugh one after the other on the list. Friends of mine who went to U of Iowa remember attending lectures in Shambaugh Hall. Like Veblen at Princeton, Shambaugh at U of I had a profound impact on the development of the university. Shambaugh not only built the political science department but also established the State Historical Society of Iowa and promoted the study of local history. A description of Ben Shambaugh and his wife--"The couple had no children, but their home was always a social center for Shambaugh's students and colleagues."--could also be said of the Veblens. Whether Benjamin Shambaugh and my music professor Elwood Shambaugh Derr, Jr. are related has yet to be determined, but the coincidence of names is uncanny.

More reading that sprung from the Shambaugh-Veblen connection shows just how extraordinary was that turn-of-the-century era in which Oswald Veblen came of age. Something was in the air--something like the promise of a nation on the rise. The university website gave emphasis to the list of faculty from 1900 because it represented the dawning of a new era--an era that through the efforts of Veblen and many others would raise America to a position of leadership in academics around the world. When Oswald Veblen graduated from the U. of Iowa in 1898, there were no departments, no majors, no College of Liberal Arts. Students seeking advanced training had customarily headed to Europe, for lack of adequate academic institutions in the U.S.. All that would change as the century turned, in Iowa through the work of an innovative university president, George Maclean, just as Woodrow Wilson would lead Princeton into a new era beginning in 1902. (By coincidence, another Maclean, John Maclean, Jr., Princeton University's 10th president, was "one of the chief architects of New Jersey's public education system.")

Jessie Field Shambaugh

Another remarkable Shambaugh from Iowa, born a year after Oswald, in 1881, was Jessie Field Shambaugh, who in 1910 developed the clover logo for what would become known as the 4-H Club. She chose the clover leaf because clover is so good for the soil. Each leaf had an H, representing Head, Hand, Heart, and Home. Though Veblen likely wasn't involved in 4-H, his love of intellect, physical work, people, and buildings is the embodiment of those four words.

Jessie acquired the Shambaugh name from her husband, Ira William Shambaugh. Whether he is related to my former music professor is unknown, but in any case, gratitude has multiplied, as a former composition teacher introduced me not only to musical counterpoint but an unlikely Veblen connection as well.

Veblen's Interactions with Astronomer and Visionary George E. Hale

Oswald Veblen loved buildings. He largely designed the first home for the Princeton University math department--the original Fine Hall--and as the Institute for Advanced Study came into being soon thereafter, his persistence ultimately overcame IAS founding director Abraham Flexner's resistance to building a home for the IAS.

That love of buildings may have been inherited from his grandfather, a Norwegian woodworker who immigrated to America and built a series of farms in Wisconsin, culminating in a beautifully crafted farmhouse now known as the Veblen Farmstead in Minnesota, where Oswald's father and famous uncle Thorstein grew up. Veblen's interest in buildings was surely further nurtured during his graduate and post-graduate years at the University of Chicago from 1900 to 1905, a time when great Chicago architects like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were influencing the future of architecture worldwide.

One building that may have caught Veblen's attention was Yerkes Observatory, built in 1897 by the University of Chicago. When Einstein traveled to America in 1921, this is one of the places he visited.

Located safely beyond the reach of big city lights, two hours north of Chicago in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, it was a revolutionary building in its time, combining telescopes with research and lab space in the same structure. Called "the birthplace of astrophysics," it still holds the largest refracting telescope in the world. Like the Institute for Advanced Study, whose beginnings and growth Veblen would greatly influence 30 years later, Yerkes was an elite academic enclave surrounded by nature on the outskirts of a small town.

It happens to be where I grew up, my father having been an astronomer there, and director for a stretch. When the University of Chicago closed Yerkes Observatory earlier this fall, it became like Veblen House, a historic building dependent on a nonprofit to imbue it with a new vision and a new life. That's when it occurred to me to look more closely for a connection between these two legacies.

That connection comes most clearly through astronomer George E. Hale, founder of Yerkes Observatory and faculty member at the University of Chicago from 1892 to 1905.

Born 12 years before Veblen, in 1868, Hale seems the very sort of kindred spirit Veblen would have been drawn to during their overlapping years at the University of Chicago. An extraordinary visionary, Hale had already founded a world-class observatory and would go on to found two more.

Wikipedia describes Hale as "a prolific organizer who helped create a number of astronomical institutions, societies and journals. Hale also played a central role in developing the California Institute of Technology into a leading research university." A "prolific organizer" who "played a central role"?  Veblen's legacy is often described in similar terms.

Hale and Veblen also shared a love of the outdoors. Hands-on types, they did not shy away from primitive conditions. Veblen's work for the military during WWI, studying the trajectories of artillery shells on horseback in the snowbound fields of Aberdeen Proving Grounds, shares a rugged, pioneer quality with Hale's experience installing the first telescope on a remote mountain in California twelve years before:

The story of the pioneer days on that mountain, when the astronomers lived under primitive conditions and all supplies had to be transported by burro and mule, has been dramatically told by Hale’s colleague and successor as director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, Walter Adams. He describes Hale’s insight, courage, and enthusiasm and his unexpected reaction to the novel conditions:  

Apparently combined with a deep-seated love of nature in every form was the spirit of the pioneer, whose greatest joy is the adventure of starting with little and taking an active personal part in every phase of creation and growth. 

When both Hale and Veblen left the U. of Chicago in 1905, Hale moved west to Mount Wilson Observatory, while Veblen headed east to Princeton, but some recent internet research shows that they did indeed overlap multiple times thereafter, including on the Council for the National Academy of Sciences from 1926-7. Correspondence available in the Hale archives at Caltech show interactions over several decades. The mathematics/astronomy connection came into play while Veblen was bringing mathematicians together at Aberdeen to improve ballistics calculations for the military. For many who worked with Veblen there, it was a transformative experience, as in this letter W.H. Wright wrote to Hale in October, 1918, from Aberdeen Proving Grounds:

My dear Professor Hale:- It may surprise you to hear from me at this place, but I am here very largely as the result of a letter which you wrote some months ago on my behalf, though this is not the assignment I had in mind when I requested that favor of you. However, it is a most interesting place to be in. A great deal of work is being accomplished here, as you are doubtless aware, but the office is short of men competent to handle the complicated problems involved in the study of the flight and rotation of projectiles, and the work is held up on that account. The problem is one that appeals particularly to astronomers, and Major Veblen who has charge of the Range Firing Section at this post has requested me to look for men who are skillful in the theory and practice of astronomical computing, and has authorized me to endeavor to secure their service. The matter is one of exceptional urgency.

Often, Veblen would be mentioned in Hale's correspondence as a candidate for this or that committee. A letter from Gano Dunn to Hale in December, 1925, related to postwar fundraising efforts for science in collaboration with Herbert Hoover, gives a memorable description of Veblen:

I have only a good report for Veblen. He is all that you say altho rather academic in experience and point of view. I am not sure however that this will not be an asset instead of a liability, for I know of few who give so much the impression of a sincere and distinguished intellectually competent highbrow as he. And the keynote of our song is "money for the highbrows". 

Though there was clear connection between Hale and Veblen at various points in their careers as they worked to advance their respective fields and science in general, it's still unknown whether Yerkes Observatory, an extraordinary edifice rising out of the Wisconsin prairie,  itself informed Veblen's vision for what later became the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

2017: A Memorable Year for Women Mathematicians

Before the cascading events of this fall put the national focus on women in the workplace, it was already a significant year for appreciating women and their contributions to mathematics.

Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson
The movie Hidden Figures, released just days before 2017 began, tells of the critical role three black female mathematicians played in the U.S. space program. A hunch and some research uncovered a Veblen connection to that wonderful story.

This hidden role of women has played out repeatedly in the history of mathematics and computers. It's commonly said that though early computing machines were largely designed by men, it was the women who figured out how to actually run them. Women with keen mathematical ability had already proved themselves as the first computers, whether for NASA or for Veblen's ballistics work for the U.S. military during the World Wars. A little research yielded a story from my little home town of Williams Bay, Wisconsin, home of Yerkes Observatory. According to Wikipedia, Chandreskhar, a colleague of my father's and a future Nobel Prize winner, in the 1940s

"had used top performing female high school students from Williams Bay, Lake Geneva, Elkhorn and Burlington, Wisconsin to calculate immensely difficult mathematical equations entirely by long hand, and found that their abilities and vigilance were unparalleled."

Cathleen Synge Morawetz
There's also a Veblen connection to another great female mathematician, Cathleen Synge Morawetz, who died this past August. A writeup on the American Mathematical Society website tells of her distinguished career, including many firsts for a female mathematician. At age 90, she and her husband made a donation to significantly increase funding for the Veblen Prize in geometry, out of gratitude for a kindness Oswald showed to her father a long time ago. The touching story is taken from an AMS article.

"This long association with the AMS played a part in her decision, in celebration of her 90th birthday last year, to make a major donation to the Society. The gift from her and her husband, Herbert Morawetz, significantly increased the size of the long-underfunded Oswald Veblen Prize Fund, bringing it on a par with other AMS prize funds. Veblen was a good friend of Morawetz’s father, John Lighton Synge. How this friendship began is recounted in Synge’s article “For the 100th birthday of the American Mathematical Society”, which appeared in A Century of Mathematics in America: Part 1, edited by Peter Duren (AMS, 1988). The article is a written version of a talk Synge gave at the AMS Centennial Celebration in 1988. 

In the article, he recalls an AMS meeting he attended in December 1921 in Toronto. He had come to Toronto from Dublin the year before and found few colleagues with mathematical interests similar to his own. His encounter with Veblen at that AMS meeting and the kindness and consideration Veblen showed were important to Synge as he made his way in mathematics in a new land. At the time Synge wrote the article, he was 91 years old, the same age his daughter is now. One hears in his article an echo of the lively intellect and warmth of Cathleen Synge Morawetz. For those qualities and for her many contributions to mathematics and to the profession, she has evoked great fondness in the mathematical community."

After getting contact info from friend and distinguished mathematician Joe Kohn, I tried to reach out to her this past March to let her know about our initiative to save the Veblen House, but was unable to reach her. A video interview of her, late in life, tells of how her mentor at NYU, Richard Courant, had also been a supporter of Emmy Noether (see below) in Goettingen, how becoming pregnant actually hastened her getting a PhD, and how she was for a time a trustee at Princeton University. It appears that Veblen assisted not only Moravetz's father, but also played a quiet role in laying the groundwork for her own career. A book named "Hilbert-Courant", by Constance Reid, describes Veblen's role in encouraging Courant to take a position at New York University in 1933.

Maryam Mirzakhani

2017 also saw the loss at age 40 of mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. She was the first and thus far only female mathematician to win the Fields Medal. Born in Iran, her brief but brilliant career as a professor began at Princeton before moving to Stanford.

Marina Ratner
She died this past July, after defying conventional expectations of a mathematician's trajectory by doing her best mathematical work in her later years, after turning 40.

Emmy Noether
Last but not least, and more appropriately first and most, Emmy Noether gained much deserved recognition in 2017 as part of a historical initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study entitled A Refuge for Scholars. Like Einstein, who called her one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, she was displaced by the Nazi takeover of Germany. It was Veblen who took the lead in finding her a position at Bryn Mawr and inviting her to be a Visitor at the IAS. Despite her talents being commensurate with male mathematicians of the time, or of all time, her career options were limited, as was her salary. She died in 1935 after complications from surgery. This poster about her has been on display at the IAS Fuld Hall.

Writers Stephen Dixon and E.B. White, and the Veblen Cottage in Brooklin, Maine

This time of year, as summer loses its hold on the land, people of means or circumstance return to Princeton from their summer retreats in the north. Through coincidence or serendipity, the story of Veblen House, and the profound meaning a homestead can have in people's lives, will head the opposite direction: north from the unexpectedly endearing vulture family perched on a farm cottage in Herrontown Woods to the town in Maine where a beloved spider named Charlotte once lived. There were many spiders weaving their webs on E.B. White's farm in Brooklin, Maine, but Charlotte became singularly famous for making the leap into White's imagination, and coming to life in the story he weaved.

E.B. White's farm overlooking Allen's Cove in northern Brooklin, with Arcadia National Park rising in the distance, is for sale. For properties with special histories and owners, like E.B. White's farm or, as we'll see, the Veblen's seaside cottage 5 miles to the south, a change in ownership, like the change in leadership of a nation, is fraught with peril. Will a house's special charms be preserved, or be lost to neglect or gentrification? Both E.B. White's farm and the Veblen's cottage in Brooklin came up for sale in the mid-1980s. Veblen's cottage at the time was being rented out in the summer to the writers Anne Frydman and Stephen Dixon, who loved the cottage like E.B. White loved his farm. How E.B. White's farm fared since being sold in 1986, perhaps aided by its historic designation, is described in this article in New England Today. The trajectory of the Veblen's Maine cottage is described in the correspondence I had with Stephen Dixon, below.

The Veblens would journey north from Princeton each summer to their rustic cottage on Nasqueg Point in Brooklin. They had discovered the area through Elizabeth's sister and brother in law, Charlotte and Clinton Davisson, who had bought a house there. Beginning in the mid-1960s, with Oswald gone and Elizabeth getting up in years, the cottage stood empty for about ten years, until poet and translater Anne Frydman found it and convinced the Veblen's niece Elizabeth Davisson to let her rent it.

From 1979 to 1986, Anne and her husband, writer Stephen Dixon, spent their summers there, surrounded by the simplicity and soul of the cottage, and breathing what must be the most delicious ocean breezes. As Stephen describes in his emails to me, he and Anne left everything in the cottage just as it had been when the Veblens lived there--the formidable cooking wood stove, the bookshelf of Ulysses, Conrad and Yeats, the antique clocks, even the Veblen's spicerack, with spices long since hardened in their jars. The cottage was "too beautiful to change", even the curious combined toilet-shower accessed from the patio (knowing about it adds extra meaning to a similar toilet-shower combination in the Veblen House).

Like E.B. White's farm, whose barn and animal life found its way into Charlotte's Web, the Veblen's cottage in Maine found its way into stories Stephen Dixon wrote while living there. He sent me a list, which I'll include here further down, and the cottage shows up in photos on the front and back of a book of Anne Frydman's poetry, published posthumously in 2016, The Three O'Clock Bird.

There are many characters in the story of Veblen House, and not all of them are people. Some are animals, others are plants (the writer of the story being a botanist), and a number are the buildings themselves. Along with the Veblen House and the Maine cottage, there was, and still is, the cottage in Herrontown Woods that began as a farmhouse in 1875. Both cottages were unwinterized when the Veblens owned them, with two chimneys and a large cooking stove.

Brooklin, as described on its wikipedia page, sounds like "Herrontown North". Fish fertilizer was used to make the rocky ground productive, and back in the 1880s, around when Veblen was born in Iowa, the town of Brooklin was known for its smoked herring. All this can also be said of northeastern Princeton, which was originally known as "Herringtown". Is it chance that a man whose grandparents had come to America from Norway would be drawn to rocky landscapes and live his summers with a view eastward across the Atlantic?

In our work to save and repair the Veblen House and cottage in Herrontown Woods, there's been discussion of whether it's worth saving the cottage, which is in considerable disrepair. Veblen bought it in 1936, and used it for his study. Now it is unique in Princeton, a small, simple but well-built farmhouse, made both vulnerable and enchanting by its isolated setting surrounded by woods.

Both E.B. White, writing at a simple bench he built in a converted boathouse, and Stephen Dixon's descriptions below, speak to the affection people can hold for simple but elegant shelters. E.B. White's favorite book is said to have been Thoreau's Walden. Less can be more, and the cottage in Herrontown Woods can be an enduring reminder of a simpler past if we are able to save it.

I learned of Stephen Dixon and his 8 years residency at the Veblen cottage in Maine through Jane Smith of Charlottesville, Virginia, a good friend of the Veblen's niece, namesake and sole family heir, Elizabeth Davisson, who inherited the Veblen cottage when Elizabeth died in 1974. Stephen taught in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins for 26 years, and over the course of his life has written more than 500 short stories and 15 novels, two of which were nominated for the National Book Award.

During the summers they spent in Brooklin, the Veblen Cottage found its way into their hearts and into their writings. After a lifetime of writing on a manual typewriter, Dixon's hands overpower a computer keyboard, like a steam engine casting sparks of collateral letterage as he types his emails. The collateral letterage has been edited out, the better to appreciate all he has to tell.

Of note in the correspondence is what he heard about Oswald (that "he got his best ideas chopping wood"), the gradual memory of the special kind of tea the Davissons drank (lapsang souchong, which is truly distinctive and delicious), the mention of caretaker Stan Gray (who served in Maine as Max Latterman served at the Veblen House), and Stephen's deep appreciation of the cottage's charm and simplicity. There is a mix of joy and sadness. While the Veblen's farm cottage in Herrontown Woods suffered from neglect after it was donated to the public trust, the Veblen cottage in Maine experienced the opposite when it was sold in 1986--a gentrification that preserved the cottage while sacrificing the qualities that the Dixons had found so appealing.

The correspondence can be seen by clicking on "Read more".

Weyl Fermion Discovery--The Veblen Connection

When I saw the headline "After 85-year search, massless particle with promise for next-generation electronics discovered" among the Princeton University website's top stories, my response was a bit cynical. So many headlines tease us with important discoveries that could transform society, only to reveal deeper into the text that the discovery won't find practical uses for decades, if ever.

The text reporting this discovery, however, got more interesting as it went along. Turns out the massless particle was first proposed "by the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1929." If you look at the Robert Nolan biography of Oswald Veblen, you find that Veblen "was largely responsible for selecting the other members of the original faculty (of the Institute for Advanced Study): James W. Alexander II, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Hermann Weyl."

The Princeton University article goes on to say:

"Weyl fermions have been long sought by scientists because they have been regarded as possible building blocks of other subatomic particles, and are even more basic than the ubiquitous, negative-charge carrying electron (when electrons are moving inside a crystal). Their basic nature means that Weyl fermions could provide a much more stable and efficient transport of particles than electrons, which are the principle particle behind modern electronics. Unlike electrons, Weyl fermions are massless and possess a high degree of mobility; the particle's spin is both in the same direction as its motion — which is known as being right-handed — and in the opposite direction in which it moves, or left-handed."

Maybe someone's imagination, massless and possessing a high degree of mobility, will find useful applications for the Wehl fermion much sooner than later, in which case we will need to invent a dance in which we all spin both directions at the same time.

Veblen's Mathematical Genealogy

I was talking to a classical pianist the other day, and told her I'm three generations removed from Bela Bartok. She replied that she's 6th generation Beethoven. My link to Bela Bartok stems from having studied piano with Michele Cooker, who studied with Gyorgy Sandor, who was a student of Bartok's. Though Michele taught me piano rather than composition, maybe some quality of Bartok rubbed off, because I went on to write many short piano pieces for my students, in the spirit of Bartok's Mikrokosmos.

Similar lineages are traced in the world of mathematics. Jon Johnson, who's on the board of Friends of Herrontown Woods, sent me this link documenting Oswald Veblen's mathematical descendants. By this count, Veblen had 16 students and 10,126 descendants. The second number will steadily increase as descendants advise each new generation of mathematicians. The majority of Veblen's mathematical descendants can be attributed to three of his students, Alonzo Church, R.L. Moore, and John Whitehead. That Veblen played the advisor role for just 16 students must owe in part to his having left Princeton University to join the Institute for Advanced Study, which did not have the traditional advisory relationship between faculty and graduate students.

William Albert Hiltner Turns 100

A bit of a personal note. My father, William Albert Hiltner, turns 100 today. (He's on the far left in the photo.) I wish he were still around to celebrate it, but even though he died 23 years ago, the day still has meaning.

Somewhat akin to Oswald Veblen, he became a prominent academic after growing up in midwest farm country, a descendent of farmers and carpenters. Whereas Veblen went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, my father got his first job there some 40 years later, first as an instructor and later as professor of astronomy. In the 1940s, that meant moving to Wisconsin, where U of Chicago had its world famous Yerkes Observatory, with its largest of refracting telescopes and clear, "photometric" winter skies making it a center of research. There's a Wisconsin connection for the Veblens, it having been where Oswald's grandparents first settled after immigrating from Norway. Also like Veblen, my father assumed leadership roles, first as director of Yerkes and later as head of AURA, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.

He loved the outdoors, sailing, and took us on whitewater canoeing trips in northern Wisconsin even though he didn't know how to swim. Some of my fonder memories are of volunteers working together to get the piers and tents ready each year for girl scouts at a camp in northern Wisconsin--the sort of hands-on group effort Veblen may have been getting at when he'd organize colleagues for ventures into the Institute woods to clear brush. Such group effort is rarer today, removed as we are several generations more from the barn raisings of America's rural past.

Among other parallels was the influence that work for the military had on my father's approach to science. This is described in an online bio at the American Astronomical Society website:

"During World War II Al was engaged in the production of front surface mirrors, and in military optics design and modeling, an experience which influenced his later interest in astronomical instrumentation." 

Veblen's vision for an institute for advanced study was influenced by the informal atmosphere he found while working at a military proving grounds to improve ballistics during WWI. It was also the vast computations required to create trajectory tables for artillery that gave Veblen an appreciation for early computer designs.

My father's passion for his work extended from research, to teaching, to the hands-on aspects of instrument design. He maintained a youthfulness and inquisitiveness to the end, learning to swim at age 64, and spending the last seven years of his life as project manager for the Magellan Project, designing twin telescopes to be built on a mountain in Chile. 

These qualities are shared by Veblen, who made important contributions to mathematics but also lent early support to computer research, at a time when the potential of computers was far from obvious. Quoting from Deane Montgomery's obituary for Veblen in the Bulletin of American Mathematics, 

"Veblen remained rather youthful in his point of view to the end, and he was often amused by the comments of younger but aging men to the effect that the great period for this or that was gone forever. He did not believe it. Possibly part of his youthful attitude came from his interest in youth; he was firmly convinced that a great part of the mathematical lifeblood of the Institute was in the flow of young mathematicians through it."

It's this forward looking point of view, this capacity to see a path forwards and willingness to take on all the obstacles in that path, that I most admire in these men, and those who are working together to preserve and repurpose the house and farmstead the Veblens left to the public trust.

Old Fine Hall

Numerous sources state that Oswald Veblen largely designed the original Fine Hall, an innovative academic building that housed the Princeton University mathematics department from 1930 to 1969, and also served as home for the Institute for Advanced Study during its early years. Many will know Old Fine Hall as the location of Einstein's office when he first came to Princeton. When the math department (reluctantly) moved to the new Fine Hall in the 1960s, Old Fine Hall was renamed Jones Hall. It currently is home to the East Asian Studies Department.

In Old Fine Hall can be seen the merging of Veblen's vision for mathematics, his love of buildings, and his deep admiration for the legacy of Henry Fine, whose tragic death in 1929 had prompted the Jones family to donate funds for the building's construction. The building exemplifies the theme of "bringing together" found in many aspects of Veblen's legacy, and codified in a poem on this website.

From Veblen's own description: 'We have long felt the need for offices on the campus and now we have not only offices but actual studies, so attractive that many of us will be doing our private reading and research in these rooms rather than in our own homes. These rooms are going to be a godsend to young men on small salaries who find it hard to afford a house with a suitable study. The new building contains studies for all the permanent members of the staff and also for a certain number of advanced students. These quiet and comfortable rooms have already in two or three weeks, had a perceptible effect in drawing the group of mathematicians and mathematical physicists closer together and in promoting a spirit of cooperation."

"This increase of the solidarity of the mathematical group and its closer relationship to the physics group was definitely in mind in the planning of the common room a sort of club room and lounge for mathematicians and physicists, with a small kitchenette nearby. There is also another room of this sort reserved for professors. This is on the principle, not always understood by those who try to bring about closer relations between faculty and students, that in all forms of social intercourse the provisions for privacy are as important as those for proximity."

The next four photos are combined with text from George Dyson's book, Turing's Cathedral: Equations for gravitation, relativity, quantum theory, five perfect solids, and three conic sections were set into leaded glass windows, and the central mantel-piece featured a carving of a fly traversing the one-sided surface of a Mobius strip.

"Every little door knob, every little gargoyle, every little piece of stained glass that has a word on it, was something that Veblen personally supervised,” noted Herman Goldstine in 1985.

(The door to Einstein's office.)

“There are nine offices with fireplaces and fifteen without,” reported Veblen. “Overstuffed chairs and davenports take the place of chairs and desks and the classrooms are fitted out after the manner of private studies,” reported Science magazine. The rooms were paneled in American oak, with concealed chalkboards and built-in filing cabinets.

In April 1930, Veblen wrote to Albert Einstein requesting permission to inscribe a remark Einstein had made in Princeton in 1921—“Raffi niert ist der Herr Gott aber Boshaft ist Er nicht” (translated at the time as “god is clever, but not dishonest”)—above the fireplace in the Professors’ Lounge. “It was your reply when someone asked you if you thought that [Dayton C.] Miller’s results would be verified,” Veblen explained. “I hope you will not object to our using this ‘child of your wit.’ Einstein replied that “Lord” or “God” might be misconstrued, suggesting that what he really meant was “Nature conceals her secrets in the sublimity of her law, not through cunning.” (end of quote from Dyson)

The paneling, with its unusual and varied patterns, is built of quarter sawn oak.

Veblen describes the beautifully wrought library thus:

"The chief need was for a convenient library and suitable studies. This library was placed on the top floor so that it should be as far removed from traffic and noise as possible. In order to make it easier to enforce a rule of silence there are four talking rooms in the four corners, where we can go when we want to discuss what we have been reading.

It is very desirable that the books on physics and mathematics should be close together. The new building is next to the physical laboratory, and the mathematics and physical libraries have been combined."

Below are fuller quotes from various online sources, with links.

From a bio of Veblen on a British website:

In 1929 funds were provided for Fine Hall at Princeton and Veblen provided most of the ideas that went into its design. He wanted the mathematicians in Fine Hall to be able to:-

... group themselves for mutual encouragement and support. [It had to be a place where] the young recruit and the old campaigner [could have] those informal and easy contacts that are so important to each of them.

However he also wanted a room reserved for professors since:-

... not always understood by those who try to bring about closer relations between faculty and students [is] that in all forms of social intercourse the provisions for privacy are as important as those for proximity.

From Robert Nowlan's online biography: 

Veblen largely designed the original Fine Hall, named for the deceased educator. It is an architectural masterpiece with a common room on the first floor on the way to the library. Faculty did not merely have offices, they were given lavish suites to provide a comfortable place to meet and talk with students. Fine Hall served as home to the Princeton mathematics department until 1969 when the growth of faculty and students made it necessary to build a new home, also named Fine Hall.  The old building was renamed Jones Hall, to honor the family who had provided the funds for the original building. Veblen began the custom of an afternoon tea at the mathematics department, where faculty and students had the opportunity for informal contacts.

From World Scientific: Academic genealogy of Mathematicians:

Veblen took charge of this project. He visited Oxford University in 1928-29 and designed Fine Hall as “Oxford College Style”. For the interior he worked closely on the furnishings with a high-quality firm of decorators from New York. Faculty members had “studies”, not “offices”; some of those were large rooms equipped with fireplaces, carved oak paneling, leather sofas, oriental rugs, and concealed blackboards. Fine Hall included a first-class departmental library, common rooms, and other facilities.

From George Dyson's beautifully written book Turing’s Cathedral:

Thomas Jones and his niece Gwethalyn pledged an additional $500,000 to build (and maintain) a new mathematics building in memory of Fine. At the time of Veblen’s arrival in Princeton, the mathematicians shared a few small offices in Palmer Hall. “The principle upon which Fine Hall was designed,” according to Veblen, “was to make a place so attractive that people would prefer to work in the rooms provided in this building rather than in their homes.” Jones, believing that “nothing is too good for Harry Fine,” instructed Veblen to construct a building that “any mathematician would be loath to leave.”

Half a million dollars (equivalent to over $6 million today) went a long way in 1929. Fine Hall opened in October of 1931, with no detail overlooked: from the showers and locker room in the basement (“members of the department who wish to avail themselves of the nearby tennis courts or the gymnasium will not find it necessary to return to their homes to dress”) to the top-floor library with natural lighting, a central atrium, and a passageway to encourage mingling with the physicists in adjacent Palmer Hall. “There are nine offices with fireplaces and fifteen without,” reported Veblen. “Overstuffed chairs and davenports take the place of chairs and desks and the classrooms are fitted out after the manner of private studies,” reported Science magazine. The rooms were paneled in American oak, with concealed chalkboards and built-in filing cabinets. Equations for gravitation, relativity, quantum theory, five perfect solids, and three conic sections were set into leaded glass windows, and the central mantel-piece featured a carving of a fly traversing the one-sided surface of a Mobius strip. “Every little door knob, every little gargoyle, every little piece of stained glass that has a word on it, was something that Veblen personally supervised,” noted Herman Goldstine in 1985.

In April 1930, Veblen wrote to Albert Einstein requesting permission to inscribe a remark Einstein had made in Princeton in 1921—“Raffi niert ist der Herr Gott aber Boshaft ist Er nicht” (translated at the time as “god is clever, but not dishonest”)—above the fireplace in the Professors’ Lounge. “It was your reply when someone asked you if you thought that [Dayton C.] Miller’s results would be verified,” Veblen explained. “I hope you will not object to our using this ‘child of your wit.’ Einstein replied that “Lord” or “God” might be misconstrued, suggesting that what he really meant was “Nature conceals her secrets in the sublimity of her law, not through cunning.”
(For more on Dyson on this website, click here.)

Veblen's own description of Fine Hall, from the Princeton University website:

Professor Veblen made the final speech of the day. The text of his address follows: "The principal idea which has been built into Fine Hall is a very old one. It is nothing else than the idea of a university as a seat of learning. The first universities of Europe, such as Bologna, Paris, and Oxford were just loosely organized groups of learned men. The students who migrated from one of these centers of learning to another were very much the same sort of people as the graduate students and research fellows of today, poor material for the diplomatic service, but full of intellectual curiosity and sometimes having a spark of genius.

"The modern American university is a complicated organism devoted to a variety of purposes among which creative scholarship is sometimes overlooked. Those universities which do recognize it as one of their purposes are beginning to feel the necessity of providing centers about which people of like intellectual interests can group themselves for mutual encouragement and support, and where the young recruit and the old campaigner can have those informal and easy contacts that are so important to each of them.

"Such intellectual centers are provided in Princeton by a splendid group of laboratories for the experimental sciences and by McCormick Hall for the Department of Art and Archeology and the group of rooms devoted to the classics in Pyne Library. Now we have Fine Hall for the mathematicians and I hope that it will not be many years before we have analogous centers for other groups of scholars. I say analogous centers rather than similar ones, for I suppose that the historians or the philosophers will need something which differs from Fine Hall as much as Fine Hall differs from the Palmer Laboratory.

"It was a new problem to design a building for mathematics. Although there are such buildings at Chicago, Paris, Gottingen, and Jena, none of these had been finished before ours was begun. But it was not a very complicated problem in this case. There was no elaborate apparatus to provide. A pencil sharpener is about all the apparatus that a mathematician requires. There was no need for many classrooms or large lecture rooms, for there are plenty of these already on the campus. The new building has two small lecture rooms and two seminar rooms which can be used informally.

"The chief need was for a convenient library and suitable studies. This library was placed on the top floor so that it should be as far removed from traffic and noise as possible. In order to make it easier to enforce a rule of silence there are four talking rooms in the four corners, where we can go when we want to discuss what we have been reading. It is very desirable that the books on physics and mathematics should be close together. The new building is next to the physical laboratory, and the mathematics and physical libraries have been combined.

"We have long felt the need for offices on the campus and now we have not only offices but actual studies, so attractive that many of us will be doing our private reading and research in these rooms rather than in our own homes. These rooms are going to be a godsend to young men on small salaries who find it hard to afford a house with a suitable study. The new building contains studies for all the permanent members of the staff and also for a certain number of advanced students. These quiet and comfortable rooms have already in two or three weeks, had a perceptible effect in drawing the group of mathematicians and mathematical physicists closer together and in promoting a spirit of cooperation.

"This increase of the solidarity of the mathematical group and its closer relationship to the physics group was definitely in mind in the planning of the common room a sort of club room and lounge for mathematicians and physicists, with a small kitchenette nearby. There is also another room of this sort reserved for professors. This is on the principle, not always understood by those who try to bring about closer relations between faculty and students, that in all forms of social intercourse the provisions for privacy are as important as those for proximity.

"This building is not only a memorial to Dean Fine. It is a definite part of his work in constructing a great mathematical center here in Princeton. You know the outline of this story: How during a long of period of time Dean Fine seized each opportunity as it arose to strengthen his by calling in young men of promise. How its prestige gradually extended so that Princeton became known throughout the world as a center of mathematical production. How this work of construction was consolidated by the generous institution of the fund for research and science by the General Education Board and Mr. Thomas D. Jones, Miss Gwethalyn Jones, Mr. William Church Osborn, and others.

"When these things had been accomplished it became evident that a building was needed as a center for the mathematical interests of the University just as the various laboratories were headquarters for the various experimental sciences. This project Dean Fine discussed with the late Mr. Wickliffe Rose, then chairman of the General Education Board and a man who can be compared with Dean Fine and Mr. Jones for his insight into general university problems. Mr. Rose was then just at the point of retiring and the project went over to the new officers of the General Education Board who were considering it sympathetically at the time of Dean Fine's death. At this point Mr. Jones, who knew of his old friend's plans and hopes, came forward and asked President Hibben to allow him and his niece to provide the building and make it a memorial to Dean Fine.

"I believe that such a project has never been carried out in a more generous style. The donors decided that the building should be not only the matter-of-fact mathematical center which we had conceived but also a place which, as Mr. Jones expressed it, any mathematician would be loath to leave.

"In carrying out this purpose of Mr. Jones and his niece, the University was fortunate not only in having the services of an architect like Mr. Charles Z. Klauder, but also in the generosity of Mrs. John Alexander who freely contributed her trained skill and taste in the choice and arrangement of the furnishings. It is not only in providing so beautiful a building that Mr. Jones and Miss Jones showed their generosity, but in many unseen ways care has been taken and additional money spent to make the building more substantial and to reduce the cost of upkeep. Moreover, for the first time on our campus, the maintenance of the building and the renewal of the furnishings have been adequately provided by endowment.

"To return to the main point, Princeton now has a first-class home for its mathematical group. I hope that it will soon have equally good ones for the other academic groups which are not yet provided for. This is not merely because I like to see my colleagues comfortable, but because I think that it would greatly strengthen the University as a seat of learning if each natural intellectual group were so placed physically as to be automatically conscious of itself and of its relation to the University as a whole. I do not mean that this is our only great need at the present time. We need more endowed professorships right in the mathematical field. But at this moment, when we have been so generously favored, it is only just to point out that what has been done for us is of general significance and should not stop with us."