The Humanity Behind Science--Emilio Segrè's Biography of Enrico Fermi

One role the Veblen House could play in a town so filled with vaunted institutions of higher learning is to make scientists better known as people. They tend to be presented in the media as remote figures stripped of personality, speaking about weighty subjects from their domain of rationality. It was a mix of curiosity and serendipity that led me to one of the finest examples of writing that reveals the humanity behind the austere academic facade of scientific inquiry. 

The writings were found in Enrico Fermi: Scientist, written by Emilio Segrè, who along with having won the Nobel Prize for physics was also a gifted writer and avid historian. His photos of people and events over the course of his scientific career, donated posthumously to the American Institute of Physics, were apparently so substantial that the AIP named its visual archives in his honor. The AIP calls its Emilio Segrè Visual Archives "the human face of science," with "more than 30,000 photos of scientists and their work."

While the Institute for Advanced Study was rapidly evolving in Princeton in the 1930s, Segrè during that time was one of the "Via Panisperna boys" in Rome--young Italian physicists led by Enrico Fermi during an exciting period of discovery in atomic physics.

Two recent events, related to Oswald Veblen and also my own history, led me to be interested in Enrico Fermi. One was the donation of a book from Oswald Veblen's original library by Jean Rosenbluth, daughter of Marshall and Arianna Rosenbluth, both of whom were distinguished physicists. Marshall Rosenbluth, known in his time as the "dean of plasma physics," would be particularly well known in Princeton, home of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Enrico Fermi was on Rosenbluth's dissertation committee at U. of Chicago, and there's a memorable story told in the NY Times obituary for Rosenbluth that involves Fermi:

(Marshall Rosenbluth) liked to tell friends how Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller -- two stars of 20th-century physics -- got into an argument in 1949 while listening to him defend his doctoral thesis.

''It went on and on,'' recalled Harold Agnew, then a graduate student at Chicago, who eventually directed the weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M. ''Finally, Fermi turned to Edward and said, 'O.K., you pass.' And then he turned to Marshall, who was just 22, and said 'O.K., you pass, too.'''

The other recent reference to Fermi came when I began researching the original owner of a house that became our family home soon after we moved to Ann Arbor, MI, in 1970. My parents bought it from the estate of Walter Colby. It took fifty years, and the opportunity to meet the goddaughter of Colby, to finally prompt me to do some research. Colby, it turns out, was an atomic physicist and contemporary of Oswald Veblen. 

The NY Times obituary for Colby states:

During more than 30 years at the university, Dr. Colby made the institution a major center of physics research by recruiting to the faculty from abroad such figures as Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg and Sam Goudsmit.

This sounded very impressive, and suggested that Colby, like Veblen, was involved in finding positions for displaced scholars from Europe in the 1930s. And yet, the NY Times obituary and the wikipedia page for Fermi make no mention of the University of Michigan. Instead, Fermi is described as having gone first to Columbia University, then to the University of Chicago. Was Colby's role in bringing Fermi to the U.S. apocryphal?

It was Segrè's book on Fermi that revealed the answer. In the years leading up to his move from Europe to New York and Columbia University in 1939, Fermi had spent three summers in Ann Arbor, drawn in part by "two old friends, Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit, the discoverers of the electron spin, who had moved from their native Holland to Ann Arbor at the instigation of Professor Walter Colby." From Segrè's book:

As Segrè describes, it was the positive experiences Fermi had in Ann Arbor that helped set the stage for his eventual emigration to America. That decision, and a similar decision by other great European physicists and mathematicians, helped insure that the United States would be the one to develop the atomic bomb, rather than the Nazis or Mussolini.

These passages begin to show how Emilio Segrè a prominent physicist in his own right, was also gifted with a talent for close observation and an ability to give us a dispassionate but engaging, three-dimensional account of other scientists' inner and outer world. Below are some passages from the book that provide insight into how Fermi thought, worked, and influenced those around him. Click on "read more" below to continue reading.

The Humanity Behind Science -- Mathematician Ingrid Daubechies

One role the Veblen House could play in a town so filled with vaunted institutions of higher learning is to make scientists better known as people. They tend to be presented in the media as remote figures stripped of personality, speaking about weighty subjects from their domain of rationality. As civilization has increasingly veered towards self-destruction, first with the nuclear arms race and now with a headlong radicalizing of the climate, scientists are primarily seen in the role of sounding the alarm. Caring people in a careless world, they are cast in the predictable, sober role of expressing concern while the rest of humanity goes its merry, scary way. Having grown up among scientists, I was able to see them as people who brought incredible perseverance, creativity, joy and humor to their study of the nature of things. 

One piece of recent writing that captures that side of science was Siobhan Roberts' portrait of Belgian mathematician Ingrid Daubechies, who in 2004 became Princeton University's first female full professor of mathematics. In her career, first in Belgium, then in the U.S., she has developed mathematical tools that have helped make possible the visual feast of the digital age, and she has even shown how artificial intelligence could be used to conserve and restore iconic artworks.

Entitled "The Godmother of the Digital Image," the article gives a portrait of Daubechies as optimistic, generous, creative, and fun-loving. 

The optimism perhaps comes from being able to solve problems others cannot:

"She revels in finding meaningful and practical problems — and solutions — where other mathematicians assume there are none."

And there's generosity in the way she uses this capacity to help her students:  

“I called her the deus ex machina adviser,” says Cynthia Rudin, a Duke computer scientist who is one of her former Ph.D. students. “When you’re in the depths of despair, your project has crashed and burned and you have almost proven that what you’re trying to do is impossible, Ingrid comes along and pulls you out of the pit of doom, and you can keep going.”

A mathematician can more easily think, and act, outside the box. How many people do you know who would throw a big shindig on their 64th birthday rather than their 65th, because 64 is a more compelling number, being a power of 2? 

"Daubechies booked a venue, a caterer, a troupe of majorette dancers known for farce — and then at the party made a surprise appearance in the baton-twirling cancan line, disguised in makeup and a tutu."

Along with her periodic "cathartic weeding in her garden," one of Daubechies' mottos, “Math can help! As always!”, reminds me of a letter about Oswald Veblen from 1992 in Princeton's Town Topics newspaper:

He and his friends spent Sunday afternoons clearing the poison ivy from the bank of the canal. He advocated washing vigorously with yellow soap after this. "You bet! "as he was prone to say. - ELIZABETH G MENZIES 926 Kingston Road

The letter writer, Elizabeth G. Menzies, turns out to have been the first female official photographer for Princeton University, who made a name for herself with a photo of Albert Einstein that appeared in a 1939 issue of Scientific American. 

Roberts' article also delves into Daubechies' efforts to help other women overcome institutional bias and gain deserved prominence in the field of mathematics. Veblen took on this role in the 1930s, helping the great mathematician Emmy Noether get positions at Bryn Mawr College and the Institute for Advanced Study. 

While it's easy to see mathematics as intimidatingly complex, it is not uncommon among mathematicians of Daubechies' caliber to find in their work an underlying elegance and beauty. Describing how she found a practical application for wavelets without sacrificing the beauty of the original concept, she said,

“It is something that mathematicians often take for granted, that a mathematical framework can be really elegant and beautiful, but that in order to use it in a true application, you have to mutilate it: Well, they shrug, That’s life — applied mathematics is always a bit dirty. I didn’t agree with this point of view.”

Thanks to a gifted writer like Siobhan Roberts, people can begin to see how much humanity and passion a scientist can bring to her work.

Other posts about great women in math and science:

2017: A Memorable Year for Women Mathematicians

Vera Rubin: The Courage of Her Curiosity

Math Writ Large in Hidden Figures

Vera Rubin--The Courage of Her Curiosity

A friend sent an article from the Atlantic Magazine announcing that a telescope is being renamed in honor of the great astronomer Vera Rubin. That article in turn has led to autobiographies by Ruben and another great astronomer, Margaret Burbidge, both of whose careers intersected with my father's.

Largely government funded, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the first national U.S. telescope to be named after a woman. Though the story has no direct connection to Oswald Veblen, it is congruent with his heritage and legacy. In the late 1800s, when women had far fewer options for pursuing higher education, Veblen's parents and grandparents sent all their children to college, daughters and sons alike. One generation attended Carlton College, the next the University of Iowa, which has the distinction of being the first public co-educational university in the U.S..

Oswald would take that familial heritage into his career in Princeton, where he used his position of influence to help the great mathematician Emmy Noether, displaced after the Nazi takeover in Germany find employment in the U.S.. Veblen took the lead in helping find her a position at Bryn Mawr and inviting her to be a Visitor at the IAS. By that time, 1933, Veblen had left Princeton University to become the first faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study, which was non-discriminatory from its inception. Princeton University, on the other hand, was men-only until 1975. When Vera Rubin expressed an interest in attending Princeton for graduate studies in 1948, the university would not even send her an application. Princeton ultimately came around, giving her an honorary degree in 2005.

Vera Rubin, who was a lifelong advocate for women in science, was herself inspired by a woman astronomer born 110 years earlier than herself, Maria Mitchell. Demonstrating the power of history and legacy, Rubin reportedly chose to attend Vassar College because Mitchell had been a professor of astronomy there 80 years prior.

The story of Vera Rubin has its most direct connection here to my own family's history. The first connection I discovered is geographical. Cerro Pachon, the mountain in northern Chile where the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is nearing completion, is only a half hour from Cerro Tololo, where I spent some free-range halcyon days as a boy, exploring the desert and tossing rocks off the edge of the mountain while my father, W. A. Hiltner, was on extended observing runs.

Another connection is also through my father's career, which intersected to some extent with Vera Rubin's, as in this 1971 photo with my father on the left and Vera Rubin's on the right (courtesy of the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Dorothy Crawford Collection), and to a much greater extent with the work of astronomer Margaret Burbidge. A NY Times obituary from 2016 states that "Dr. Rubin, along with Margaret Burbidge ..., was a “guiding light” for a generation of female astronomers."

If it's possible to encapsulate major contributions, "Rubin’s work in the 1970s provided convincing evidence that dark matter existed," while Margaret Burbidge and her husband and fellow astronomer Geoff Burbidge, "were best known for their work in the mid-1950s describing how stars synthesize nearly all the chemical elements in the universe, from carbon and iron to lead and uranium."

The Burbidges, originally from England, along with two other great scientists, Fred Hoyle and William Fowler, stirred things up in the astronomy world with their progressive thinking. Their names were very familiar in our household, growing up.

In reading the interviews and autobiographies of Vera Rubin and Margaret Burbidge, I was gratified to discover the role my father played in Margaret's career early on. This was at a time when many institutions of higher education considered astronomy a men-only profession. Margaret's application in 1945 for a Carnegie Fellowship in Pasadena was rejected due to her being a woman, and in 1948 Vera Rubin, as mentioned, was not even allowed to apply for graduate studies at Princeton University. The largest telescope, at Mt. Palomar, would be unavailable for women until Rubin broke through that barrier in the mid-60s, famously taping the figure of a skirt on the bathroom door to create a women's bathroom.

There were no such restrictions at the University of Chicago's department of astronomy, and its two renowned observatories in Wisconsin and Texas. My father was on the faculty at U. of Chicago, based at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. In 1951, he was able to arrange funding for Margaret to take a position there, and later came up with a way for her to get coveted observing time on the 82" telescope at McDonald's Observatory in Texas. From her autobiographical essay:

Before the cold Yerkes winter set in, Geoff and I prepared a program to submit for McDonald observing time ... But the time for submission was past; since we wanted winter time when the December Milky Way was up, we were too late. Here the never-to-be-forgotten kindness of Al Hiltner came to our rescue. He had set me to work on prevention of internal reflections and scattered light in a spectrometer for calibrating coude plates at McDonald, and he had a month (I believe) scheduled for photometry at McDonald. He said there would be many nonphotometric nights during this period, and if Geoff and I could get ourselves to McDonald ... we could have the non-photometric nights for spectroscopy ...

Gratifying, too, was reading Burbidge's and Rubin's descriptions of their burgeoning curiosity as children. It brought back memories of growing up among astronomers who loved their work, in a family where curiosity and creativity were valued. Science for me has always been about beauty and exploring the magnificence of creation. 

 Vera Rubin describes her curiosity about the world and her active imagination:

As a youngster, more questions followed. Why did the pictures on my bedroom wall jump back and forth on each side of my finger as I lay in bed blinking my eyes? How did water drops in a stream know on which side of a rock to pass? Could I, a lazy child, devise a street on which one sidewalk went uphill and one side downhill, so that I could always walk downhill? A little later, the questions were more conventional. How many license plates can be made with three numbers and two letters? This puzzle I solved as we drove to our new home in Washington, D.C.

Margaret Burbidge describes it this way:

At age 4, before beginning school, my first view of the beauty of stars in the summer sky during a night-time boat crossing from England to France was the earliest step toward a lifetime love of astronomy. Then I developed an early interest in arithmetic and in numbers (especially large ones with many powers of ten to write out and contemplate); this began in my first years in school. I had learnt to read before going to school, so books were a continuing delight. My parents gave me books written for children on all the natural sciences, and reading these was coupled with both my mother's and father's willingness to show me and tell me about the wonders of the seashore, of flowers, plants, and trees (both my sister and I became passionate tree climbers throughout Hampstead Heath, near which we lived). My love of flowers is lifelong, and has been inherited by my own daughter.

And later in her youth:

When I was 12 or 13 years old, my grandfather gave me Sir James Jeans' popular books on astronomy. Suddenly, I saw my fascination with the stars, born at age 4, linked to my other delight, large numbers. That the nearest star is 26,000,000,000,000 miles away revived those excitements of my first school years (although falling short of my then favorite contemplation, 1 followed by 36 zeros). I decided then and there that the occupation I most wanted to engage in "when I was grown up" was to determine the distances of the stars. My mother recalled telling me, as I lay on my stomach on the floor reading the wonders described by Jeans, that it was bedtime, and that I pleaded for a little more time: "Mum, it's so exciting!" 

Combined with the intellectual and emotional delight--and resonating with Veblen's hiking and woodchopping ways--was the pleasure Margaret found in the physicality of exploration, whether climbing trees as a kid or spending nights in the dome of an observatory with the heavens above. My father came to astronomy after growing up on a farm, and brought that appetite for physical work and resilience against the elements with him, donning insulated underwear for long nights in the Wisconsin winter, where the best nights for observing were also the coldest.

Margaret put it this way:

I often think about the joys of work in an open dome, under the stars, next to the telescope, joys denied to most younger astronomers and students who must sit in a warm console room, facing a television guiding screen and many complex computer interfaces, well removed from the telescope itself. 

Smuggling that avid curiosity and sense of wonder into adulthood not only enriched their lives. It likely helped Vera Rubin and Margaret Burbidge break through (or find ways around) the barriers they encountered as women in a profession dominated by men. One sentence in Vera Rubin's autobiography stood out. In 1960, Rubin had just arrived in the Netherlands for an International Summer Course in Science. There she heard lectures from some of the world's greatest astronomers--Jan Oort and the Burbidges among them. "Initially," she wrote, "Oort terrified me, but I soon had too many questions to stay silent."

Thus the title of this post: The Courage of Her Curiosity. In the 21st century, when so many people hold convictions, sure they are right when surely they are wrong, we would do well to turn to curiosity as a better source of courage.

(Vera Rubin posing with Kitt Peak Observatory in the background--an institution my father played an important role in developing, and where a telescope bears his name. It was at Kitt Peak in 1968 that Vera Rubin and Kent Ford made discoveries that would transform our understanding of the universe. Thanks to AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives for these photos.)

Astronomer John Irwin: A Familial and Veblen Connection

One of my favorite astronomers from my youth turns out to have had a connection to Oswald Veblen. John Irwin was a colleague of my father's who loved kids and hiking as much as he loved astronomy. He'd stop by Yerkes Observatory for American Astronomical Society meetings, and my older sister remembers him getting down on his hands and knees in the living room of the director's house and giving her a horse ride. As a kid growing up around astronomers, you remember those few that would come down to your level, and John was one of those who would literally do that.

I remember him from family visits to Chile in the mid-1960s, where he was living with his wife on top of the next mountain over from Tololo, where my father would have observing runs. (Note: In reading recently a bio of the well-known popularizer of astronomy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, I noticed that he did his graduate observing at Tololo.) John was doing the site surveying work that lays the groundwork, so to speak, for siting new observatories in the northern Chilean desert--one of the best places in the world to do astronomy. One of the mountains he explored, Las Campanas, would two decades later be the site for the Magellan telescopes--my father's last design project.

One thing observatories in the desert need is a water supply, and one day John took my brother Bill and me on a hike down the mountain to check the flow in the creek from which Tololo drew its water. We were hiking down a steep slope when I lost my footing and did what must have looked like a wild improvisatory dance as I slid down the mountainside, trying to break my momentum. When I finally came to a stop, unscathed, he congratulated me on my footwork. That sort of compliment means a lot to a kid, and it's always stayed with me.

He told us about a mountain that had many false summits, that is, the climber would look up and think the summit close at hand, only to soon discover that the mountain continues up and there is much hiking still to do. A climber, tight against the mountainside with limited view of what's above, can be fooled multiple times before finally reaching the top. That story has come to resonate with life and work in general. John loved mountains so much that he celebrated his 85th birthday by climbing his favorite mountain, Mount Whitney, in the Sierra Nevadas of California. His father's family was from Philadelphia, and claimed Ben Franklin as an ancestor.

Along with his Veblenesque combining of intellect and a love of the outdoors, John has a familial connection to Princeton and its math department. He was born in Princeton in 1909, while his mathematician father, Frank Irwin, was serving an instructorship from 1908-11, alongside Veblen, who had arrived three years earlier. Both were hired by Henry Fine, for whom the PU mathematics building is named.

As a young man, John lived for awhile in Iowa City, Veblen's home town, and was one of the first astronomers to write, back in 1948, about the potential of the early computers that Veblen had done so much to bring into being.

During one of those visits to the mountains of Chile in the mid-1960s, my family drove one evening over to the mountain where John and his wife had their house. After dinner we played Hearts. I'm guessing it was his favorite card game, and quickly became ours. "I smell smoke," John would say ominously, when he surmised that someone was trying to flush the queen of spades. Other things John liked to say were "Much grass, poor flavor"--his comic play on the Spanish "muchas gracias, por favor"--and "We're off in a pile of monkey vomit," spoken with mock grandness at the beginning of a journey, lest we take human enterprise too seriously.

At some point that evening, I went outside and walked to the edge of the mountain, maneuvering around boulders and the droppings of goats. At the edge, lit by a deep universe of stars and moon, was a frozen ocean, extending out as far as I could see. It was the top of the massive cloud of fog that would move inland each night from the Pacific coast, bringing moisture to the desert. I wish everyone could have such vistas growing up, where the landscape draws your eye to look farther and farther into the distance, with the quality of the air the only limit. Maybe, with vistas like that to open up our minds and expand our thinking, we might take better care of that thin skin of air that comprises the earth's atmosphere, and take more of an interest in what lies ahead.

John Henry Barrows Irwin completed his itinerant astronomical career at Kean University, halfway between where his father grew up in Englewood, NJ, and his birthplace in Princeton. For retirement, he moved with his wife to Tucson, where he spent his last 20 years, climbing mountains.

Photo: 

Date: January 12, 1966
Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, John Irwin Slide Collection
Catalog ID: Irwin John B4

The Kuiper Belt and Veblen House--a Chance Connection

Here's a mix of recent news and personal past with a chance Veblen House connection. Kuiper, a name familiar to me from childhood, was in the news as 2019 began. In the wee hours of January 1st, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by "Ultima Thule," an object 4 billion miles from Earth in what is called the Kuiper Belt, home to Pluto and other frozen objects in what has been described as "a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system."

The term "Kuiper Belt" was new to me, but astronomer Gerard Kuiper for whom it is named was a colleague of my father's at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory. Kuiper's best known student was Carl Sagan, an astronomer who later did much to popularize science through his Cosmos television series and many books. From my recent correspondence with one of Sagan's friends and fellow student, Peter Pesch, it looks like Sagan was pursuing an unusual route in astronomy even back then: "Kuiper was exclusively interested in the solar system, which few of us were, except, of course, Carl Sagan."

In the photo, my father Al Hiltner and Gerard Kuiper are 2nd and 4th from the left, respectively, with Nobel prize winner Chandra first on the left.

Kuiper's name also popped up in a much more obscure location when I was researching the life of the Whiton-Stuarts, first owners of what became known as the Veblen House. The wife, Mary (Marshall Ogden) Whiton-Stuart, spent her last years in Tucson, AZ. Kuiper moved there in 1960 to found the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Here's a snippet from a previous post on this website:

Astronomy and the Whiton-Stuarts came together in the Nov. 16, 1964 issue of the Tucson Daily Citizen, which included Mary's obituary and, elsewhere on the same page, an announcement:

"To Speak At Dinner--Meet Dr. Gerard Kuiper, director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, will speak Sunday at the annual Compact Day dinner meeting of the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Arizona." 

Mary was an eighth generation descendant not of Mayflower pilgrims, but of a pilgrim who settled in what would become New Jersey, John Ogden.

Update: In another unexpected link between Yerkes Observatory and Veblen House, I recently contacted a U. of Chicago alum who had written a strongly worded letter to the alumni magazine lamenting the university's having moved out of the observatory. The author, Daniel Campion, happens to live in Iowa City, where Oswald Veblen grew up. Daniel took a break from his writing to research Veblen's childhood home, which will be the subject of another post. He also sent me a "squib" he had published--a short poem about Ultima Thule called "Marriage Made in Heaven."

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.

Mathematics and Memory Meet in Tucson, AZ

This post is prompted by a texted photo from a friend of mine, Carl Hildebrandt. It wasn't a casual selfie. He took it only after riding his bike all the way up a mountain outside Tucson, AZ to reach Kitt Peak Observatory, where there's a telescope named after my father.

Carl, too, has math and science flowing through his veins. His grandfather Theophil Henry Hildebrandt's career as a mathematician paralleled Veblen's in many ways. Hildebrandt arrived at University of Chicago for graduate work just as Veblen was leaving for Princeton, had the same advisor, E.H. Moore, then went on to chair the math department at University of Michigan from 1934-57, and serve as president of the American Mathematical Society from 1945-6. Carl's uncle Theodore spent 1947-8 working at Princeton with von Neumann, Goldstine, and Julian Bigelow on the IAS computer project.

This snippet from Century of Mathematics in America portrays the University of Chicago as the academic center of gravity for American mathematics in 1900, spawning the PhD's who would then go forth to lead the growth of mathematics at Princeton, Harvard, Michigan and other institutions in the 20th century.

Concurrent with this fertile production of many of mathematic's future leaders, Chicago also built Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, which in 1897 was far from city lights. Yerkes, where I lived while my father was an astronomer there, had many qualities similar to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study--an academic enclave surrounded by fields and woods on the outskirts of a small town. The observatory remained a center of cutting edge research until the second half of the 20th century, when more advanced telescopes sprouted in drier climes, such as Kitt Peak, AZ.

Tucson drew not only astronomers like my father, but also two of the Whiton-Stuarts--the family that built what would later be called Veblen House. They had already lived in Prescott, AZ, decades earlier, where Jesse spent his days on horseback herding cattle--a change of pace from running his high-end real estate firm in Manhattan. His wife, Mary (Marshall Ogden) Whiton-Stuart later moved back to Arizona to live in Tucson for the last 13 years of her life, as did her daughter, Silvia, for portions of that time.

Astronomy and the Whiton-Stuarts came together in the Nov. 16, 1964 issue of the Tucson Daily Citizen, which included Mary's obituary and, elsewhere on the same page, an announcement:

"To Speak At Dinner--Meet Dr. Gerard Kuiper, director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, will speak Sunday at the annual Compact Day dinner meeting of the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Arizona." 

Gerard Kuiper was a colleague of my father's at Yerkes, and Mary may well have been a member of the Society of Mayflower Descendants. They might have met had she lived a little longer.

Thanks to Carl for prompting me to weave all these threads together.

Veblen's Role in John von Neumann's Career

Some of the richer, more colorful writing about the Veblens was uncovered recently via google. Many people who are unfamiliar with Oswald Veblen will recognize the name of John von Neumann, whom IAS director Robbert Dijkgraaf recently described as "perhaps an even greater genius than Einstein". Veblen had a keen eye for mathematical talent, and in both of these accounts is credited with bringing von Neumann to Princeton. Veblen also lent vital support to von Neumann's proposal to build one of the world's first computers at the Institute for Advanced study in the 1940s, when many scholars viewed such a machine as an intrusion.

In one, "The Martian's Daughter: A Memoir", von Neumann's daughter Marina Whitman describes the role the Veblens played, not only in furthering her father's career but also in her birth.

John L. Casti, in his book about the Institute for Advanced Study, "The One True Platonic Heaven", describes Oswald Veblen's support for von Neumann, first by getting him a position in the Princeton University Mathematics Department, soon thereafter advocating successfully for his appointment to the IAS, then supporting von Neumann's controversial project to develop a computer. Presumably, in a book that intermixes fiction and fact, the excerpt below sticks to the facts.

Two phrases in Casti's description catch the eye for anyone seeking to understand Veblen and his legacy. One is that Veblen "regarded von Neumann almost as the son he had never had." The Veblens had no children, and one interpretation of his enormous generosity towards young scholars is that he was channeling a nurturing instinct that had no familial outlet. The other is Casti's description of Veblen as "ultrarespectable and enormously influential". The more one learns about Veblen's legacy, the more one wonders at his invisibility--the multiple examples of how his name goes unmentioned, whether in the hallway history exhibit at the Institute, the literature offered to tourists at Old Fine Hall (now Jones Hall), or as founder of Princeton's open space movement. Even the house he donated for public use has been left boarded up and threatened with demolition, despite a nonprofit having been formed to repair it.

One theory, conjured early on in this research, was that he had a dark side that made people reluctant to give him credit for all the good he had done. This, it seems, is not the case. A closer look reveals a visionary, a man ahead of his time, who appears to have been on the right side of every issue, whether fighting early on against discrimination towards jews and African Americans, saving land from development, freeing scholars to pursue their research interests, or supporting the development of computers long before their potential was clear.

Math Writ Large in Hidden Figures

A friend likes to say that "all roads lead to Veblen House". On a hunch, I traced the mathematical road leading back from Katherine G. Johnson, one of three extraordinary black women mathematicians in the movie Hidden Figures, and sure enough, it led back in multiple ways to Oswald Veblen.

The movie itself is deeply moving and, despite the liberties it would appear to take for the sake of high drama, remarkably accurate and true to historical fact. Figuratively speaking, it sends its three main characters high into orbit, to shine in the sun, but not beyond the gravitational pull of earth.

All three main characters--Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson--overcome a host of obstacles facing women and blacks in 1960s Virginia to play major roles in the early days of the NASA space program and computer programming. We learn, among many things, that John Glenn refused to take that first American flight to orbit the earth until Katherine Johnson had verified the mathematics upon which the flight was based.

Oswald Veblen died in 1960, but he played a central role in developing the mathematical and computational world featured in the movie. Before there were machines called "computers", there were women called "computers" who had the patience and the smarts to do the myriad calculations required to compute trajectories. And before Alan Shepard could be the first American to soar into space in 1959, there needed to be a mathematician who could envision and accurately predict the full trajectory of his flight.

That mathematician was Katherine Johnson, and the mathematics was built on the ballistics calculations Veblen oversaw for the military at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in the first and second World Wars. Tracing Katherine G. Johnson's mathematical lineage involves finding out who her main teachers were, and who in turn taught her teachers, reaching back in time.

There's a particular passion for tracking professional lineage in mathematics, with a website devoted to the pursuit called the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Type in Oswald Veblen's name, and you find that, owing to his role as one of the "three key leaders" who "organized American mathematics" (according to Herman Goldstein), he has more than 11,000 mathematical descendants. No results came up for Katherine G. Johnson, presumably because she didn't pursue an academic career. Type in her professor at West Virginia State University, William Waldron Shieffelin Claytor--the third African American to receive a PhD in mathematics--and you find that his advisor was John Robert Kline at University of Pennsylvania.

Kline, in turn, was advised by Robert Lee Moore, who developed the "Moore method" of teaching, in which the students themselves present the material rather than being passive recipients of a lecture. Though Moore's views on race may have been influenced by his father, who fought as a Confederate in the Civil War and named his son after the Confederate general, the R.L. Moore teaching method appears to have benefitted mathematics students of all races. There's a scene in the movie in which the instructor hands Johnson the chalk and asks her to solve the problem on the blackboard in front of the class.

R.L. Moore's advisor at University of Chicago was Oswald Veblen, just before Veblen moved to Princeton in 1905. That makes Kathryn Johnson a fourth generation mathematical descendant of Veblen.

Update: An additional connection to Oswald Veblen comes through Johnson's main mentor at West Virginia State, W.W. Shieffelin Claytor, whose own brilliant career was tragically hampered by the racism he encountered. Claytor's teaching load at W. Virginia State prevented him from doing any research. Around the time that Katherine Johnson graduated (at age 18!), Veblen, who had fought long and hard to gain American mathematicians adequate time to do research, sought to bring Claytor to Princeton University, but the University did not accept "coloured persons". Four years later, Veblen offered Claytor a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, which was not subject to the university's exclusions based on race. But by that time, Claytor had apparently grown disillusioned. He "turned down the offer saying that he did not want to be a guinea pig." The heartbreaking story is told in this online biography.

Some favorite scenes in Hidden Figures are of Johnson as a young girl, feeling the excitement of math within her as she walked down a sidewalk. Mathematics is built into the incremental act of walking--something I felt as a kid counting the steps it took to cross a grassy field coming home from school--and may have been part of Veblen's love of walks in nature, an experience he insured for Princetonians by donating Herrontown Woods as Princeton's first nature preserve. In another scene in the movie, Johnson realizes that what is needed for orbital flight was not new math, but very old math, in the form of Euler's method, from the 18th century. It's interesting to speculate on whether she might have learned Euler's method from the first African American to get a mathematics PhD, Elbert Frank Cox, whose work involved "generalized Euler polynomials" and who taught at West Virginia State until 1929. The dramatic entrance of an IBM computer midway in the movie, filling a whole room and threatening the future of the female computers, brought back childhood memories of a similar machine my father used in the attic of Yerkes Observatory.

The movie caused some tearing up, particularly towards the end. Ever since experiencing that inner earthquake of my father dying--he turned his Ohio farmboy talent for mathematics into a prominent career in astronomy--there's been a channel within, geologic in feeling, through which emotion can rise to the eyes, unfettered. It's genuine emotion, but can also be manipulated to rise up by the tricks movies use to trigger a desired emotional response. To be prone to manipulation by a movie's artifice is both disconcerting and comforting. In Hidden Figures the tearing up is not only a product of the customary movie manipulation but also the deep message of equality that we carried home from the movie theater. Afterwards, researching the movie's accuracy, away from Hollywood's manipulations, the articles were as moving as the film. Here are a few, from HistoryVsHollywood, PopularMechanics, and LATimes.

Permeating the movie is the urgency of the race to space. That national urgency drove an "all hands on deck" attitude that opened cracks in oppressive views of race and gender just wide enough for the brilliance of these black women to rise, and in turn influence a nation's trajectory. Particularly in our time, when government is in the grips of a solutions-averse anti-intellectualism, it is stirring to see depicted an era when science, math and courage came together to achieve great things. Other daunting challenges, climate change being foremost, await a similar integration of national character and purpose, with similar opportunities to break through the artificial barriers that divide all nations and peoples.

Update: At the Academy Awards, Katherine Johnson had her moment in the bright lights on stage, surrounded by the three stars of the movie.

Ramanujan, Veblen, and Chandrasekhar: After seeing "The Man Who Knew Infinity"

A movie showing in town, "The Man Who Knew Infinity" (trailer here), tells the story of a brilliant but little known Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Growing up in India, in poverty and with little formal training, he produced a prodigious body of original, unconventional work that ultimately came to light through his persistent efforts to reach out to British mathematicians. Of those he sent excerpts of his work to, only G.H. Hardy of Trinity College, Cambridge, responded, in 1913. A collaboration ensued, with Ramanujan moving to England.

The movie begins with a quote from Bertrand Russell, who is one of the characters: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—"

There are multiple tensions in the movie: atheism and belief in God, the skepticism of the British mathematicians, racial and institutional prejudice, Hardy's attempts to steer Ramanujan's intuitive explorations of the infinite towards the tedious, earthbound necessity of proofs, the long-distance love for his wife left behind in India, his battles with disease.

Ramanujan was a contemporary of Oswald Veblen, born seven years later, in 1887. Both can be found in descriptions of the "Greatest Mathematicians born between 1870 and 1939 A.D." Though it's not clear if the two ever met, there are several connections between Veblen and the British mathematicians portrayed in the movie. One can find, in the google book "Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary" and elsewhere, that G.H. Hardy exchanged places with Veblen during the year 1928-29, with Hardy coming to Princeton and Veblen spending a year at Cambridge. Though Hardy was not enamored of the study of ballistics, both Veblen and Hardy's close colleague, John Littlewood, joined the military during WW I, in the U.S. and Britain, respectively, to contribute their mathematical expertise to improving ballistics. An interesting article describes Veblen's leading role in bringing a group of mathematicians together at Aberdeen Proving Grounds to work on ballistics. As important as any contribution made to ballistics, the gathering of mathematical minds at Aberdeen "created a community out of a generation of mathematicians" that influenced many of their careers. (Another potentially interesting article encountered is Placing World War I in the History of Mathematics.)

The physical link between mathematics and the human and natural gardens at Veblen House and Herrontown Woods is echoed in IAS faculty member Freeman Dyson's metaphorical praise at the 1987 centenary conference celebrating Ramanujan's contributions to mathematics. From the NY Times:

"Such mathematics has helped drive one of the major new conceptions of theoretical physics, superstring theory, as the physicist Freeman Dyson told a Ramanujan conference last month. 'As pure mathematics, it is as beautiful as any of the other flowers that grew from seeds that ripened in Ramanujan's garden.'"

In a personal aside, Ramanujan's origins reminded me of another Indian, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics. He was a colleague of my father's at Yerkes Observatory (the two furthest left in the photo). I remember reading with some surprise, having always framed discrimination in terms of black and white, that Chandra also was the victim of racial prejudice during his long career in England and the U.S.. A look into his biography shows some parallels with Ramanujan. Chandra also studied in Madras, two decades after Ramanujan, and followed the same path to Trinity College in Cambridge, with similarly dramatic results, both in extraordinary contributions and cultural tensions. A 2005 article in the Guardian, Battle for the Black Hole, describes the mistreatment Chandrasekhar is said to have endured, resulting in lasting trauma and a 40 year delay in the recognition he so deserved for his discoveries. Third from the right in the photo appears to be Gerard Kuiper, whose research supported Chandra's theories as far back as 1935. The article says Chandrasekhar's discovery was finally vindicated with the discovery of an x-ray source, Cygnus X-1, in 1972. I remember my father being very involved in studying x-ray sources at that time, specifically Sco X-1, organizing simultaneous observations around the world. Kuiper--fun fact here--was Carl Sagan's doctoral advisor at U. of Chicago.

Additional reading shows that Chandrasekhar was greatly inspired by the career of Ramanujan, and is responsible for having later tracked down the only adequate photo of the great mathematician, taken for the passport prior to his return to India from Great Britain. It's the photo above and at the end of the movie.

No clear connection between Chandra and Veblen has yet emerged, though they must have encountered each other at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where they both served during WW II along with Von Neumann and others. Both may have seen the possibilities for their own careers through their illustrious uncles, C.V. Raman and Thorstein Veblen. Raman was awarded the Nobel prize in physics. 

Update: In the original post here, I told a story of my parents taking me to dinner at the Chandrasekhars', and how I had been so overwhelmed by the smell of spices spilling out the doorway that I couldn't even enter, and spent the evening outside on the porch, working on an Around the World trick with my yoyo, while the more worldly experience of Indian cooking was going on upstairs. My older siblings tell me that the host was an Indian grad student at Yerkes, not Chandra, who with his wife lived not in town but in a house overlooking Lake Geneva.

My siblings offered some surely more accurate Chandra stories of their own. One offers insight into the sort of departmental politics that can arise out of having so many high-achieving scholars packed into a small community like Yerkes Observatory. Due to a misunderstanding created by another colleague, the department chair was keeping my father's salary low and refusing to promote him to full professor. Suddenly, my father started getting raises. Turned out that Chandra had persuaded the department chair that my father deserved better. 

Chandra dressed impeccably in British formal attire, and his wife, Lalitha (which my siblings pronounce like "Lolita"), wore traditional saris that must have seemed extraordinary in small town Wisconsin.

Another story, which can be obliquely tied to Veblen's ballistics work, involved a game I would play on the observatory grounds, in which I would see how few strokes it took to hit a golf ball all the way around the massive building. It was a challenge to send the ball flying over or inbetween trees, and there were a few times when imperfect execution sent the ball caroming off of the building's tan brick walls. Incredibly, no windows ever got broken in the process. One day, according to my brother, Chandra was passing by on his way home and stopped to talk to me, not to question my dubious pursuits but to explain the purpose of the dimples on the golf ball. Maybe his study of the flow of electromagnetic particles offered insight into how air flows around a golf ball.

In a third story, connected somewhat to Veblen's ballistics and early computer work, Chandra is said to have used top performing female students at my small-town high school in Williams Bay as an early form of "computer", to "calculate immensely difficult mathematical equations entirely by long hand". Based on that experience, he later recommended that female calculators be used to speed up aspects of the Manhattan Project. My sister remembers a Yerkes staff member, Irene Hansen, doing calculations with the aid of a small typewriter-like machine. By brother says it was a Monroe calculator, perhaps like this one, which he says helped him learn multiplication tables. He'd race the machine, and could sometimes beat it as it went "caCHUNKa, caCHUNKa, caCHUNKa". 

George Dyson, in his book Turing's Cathedral (p. 159), describes how scientists' frustration with the limitations of the Monroe calculator led in part to von Neumann's work to develop a high speed computer at the Institute for Advanced Study beginning in the mid-40s. The project was received skeptically by all at IAS but Veblen.  

Irene Hansen, whose various roles at Yerkes included assistant, secretary, and "computer", later married astronomer Donald Osterbrock, who studied with Chandrasekhar and had a post-doc at Princeton. Osterbrock and another Yerkes astronomer, Bill Morgan, contributed to the discovery of the Milky Way galaxy's spiral structure. I like this quote from Osterbrock's obit: "Morgan's methods were sometimes criticized as being "qualitative," and one critic even accused him of being 'a celestial botanist.'" How many of us get to grow up with a celestial botanist as a neighbor?

Interesting to contemplate how a love of nature led to discovering the Veblen House, long forgotten in a Princeton preserve, which led to learning of Veblen's legacy, which led via a movie about an Indian mathematician back to the world I inhabited as a child in Wisconsin.

In the movie, Ramunujan is played by Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons portrays Hardy; Toby Jones plays Hardy’s colleague John Littlewood; Jeremy Northam shows up a few times as Bertrand Russell.

A bit of an afterthought: Note the similarity in appearance between Jeremy Irons in his portrayal of G.H. Hardy

and Veblen late in life. I'm sure Veblen would be majorly flattered by the comparison.

Topologist Ian Agol, Veblen Prize recipient, wins Breakthrough Prize

A winner of the 2013 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, Ian Agol, has also just won a Breakthrough Prize of $3 million, for what the prize foundation terms "spectacular contributions to low-dimensional topology and geometric group theory". In a NY Times article, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of the Breakthrough Prizes, described them this way: “The Breakthrough Prize honors achievements in science and math so we can encourage more pioneering research and celebrate scientists as the heroes they truly are.”

Though Agol is based at the University of California, Berkeley, he has a one year position at the Institute for Advanced Study, which includes leading a workshop on 3-dimensional manifolds the week of Dec. 7.

It's interesting to trace the lineage of mathematicians via the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Working back from Ian Agol, for instance, the string of advisors are Michael Hartley Freedman, William Browder, John Coleman Moore, George William Whitehead, Jr., Norman Earl Steenrod, and then Solomon Lefschetz, who succeeded Oswald Veblen as Fine Professor in Princeton's Department of Mathematics after Veblen moved to the IAS in 1933. Another bio of Lefschetz, who was trained in Europe, can be found here.

Agol's thoughts upon receiving the Veblen Prize can be found on pp. 14-16 at this link.

Celebrating the Lives of John and Alicia Nash

There was an extraordinary day of celebrating the life and work of mathematician John Nash and his wife Alicia at Princeton University on Saturday, October 24.

Coming five months after he and his wife were killed in a car accident while returning to Princeton from Newark Airport, the series of talks about his work culminated in a moving talk by Silvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind. It's a powerful story of Nash's descent into schizophrenia. That he had Alicia to return to was mentioned as a powerful force in what for victims of the disease was a rare recovery, allowing them to share many good years before they were taken from us.

The talks were followed by a remembrance service at Princeton University Chapel. There's a writeup with photos on the Princeton University website. Though I didn't know John Nash, I found the service very moving--the beauty of the music, the testimonials, the splendor of the chapel. Jim Manganaro, who was a good friend of the Nashes and has expressed ongoing interest and support for the Veblen House project over the years, was one of the speakers. Noting John Nash's precise use of the english language, he told the story of Alicia saying at the dinner table that an offering of pie was too big for her, since she was on a diet. John pointed out that the piece of pie was not too big for Alicia, but too big for a diet.

A Veblen connection--a chapter of A Beautiful Mind begins with a description of "May" Veblen, Oswald's wife--is written about in a previous post.

Update, Nov. 10: I heard from Joseph Kohn, who MC'd Silvia Nasar's presentation, that the various talks will be making it on to the internet at some point.