Veblen a "Towering Figure" in Mathematics

It's gratifying to see Oswald Veblen being more widely recognized on the internet for his contributions to American mathematics. There are still many tellings of history in which Veblen remains hidden, however. Meeting a retired Princeton-based physicist/violinist recently, I naturally thought of Einstein and told him I was researching Oswald Veblen's influence in bringing Einstein to Princeton. He said emphatically that it was the Bambergers who brought Einstein instead, through their funding of the Institute for Advanced Study. He then mentioned Richard Courant, and gave credit to New York University for bringing this great jewish mathematician to America after he was displaced from Gottingen by the Nazis. 

But behind both of these stories of brilliant and impactful immigration is Oswald Veblen, who was quietly instrumental in bringing many displaced mathematicians and physicists to America. A succinct, attractively rendered telling of the story, called "Collaboration and Companionship," repeatedly mentions Veblen's involvement in bringing Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Emmy Noether, John von Neumann, Kurt Godel, and Richard Courant to the U.S.

That webpage links to another entitled "Towering Figures," in which brief stories are told of four "key individuals in pioneering and continuing the growth of the American Mathematical community": J.J. Sylvester, Felix Klein, E.H. Moore, and Oswald Veblen. 

Veblen had a connection to each of the three other "towering figures" who preceded him. His father, Andrew, would surely have studied with J.J. Sylvester at Johns Hopkins before moving to the University of Iowa in 1883 to teach physics and math--the same year Sylvester returned to Europe. And surely his father would have taken a 13 year old Oswald to hear Felix Klein speak in 1893 at the International Mathematical Congress held as part of the Chicago World's Fair. Oswald went on to study with E. H. Moore in Chicago, before moving to Princeton. 

A couple asides: Biographies of Sylvester and Klein mention their work to encourage women to pursue careers in mathematics, as did Veblen.

On a more autobiographical note, I expect the Veblens would also have witnessed the 40 inch refracting telescope on display at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. When I was growing up 70 years later, my father, W. Albert Hiltner, was director of Yerkes Observatory, where that largest of refracting telescopes still functions beneath the big dome. The Collaboration and Companionship story also describes how the Manhattan Project convinced President Hutchins of the University of Chicago to "throw massive resources into the reorganization" of the physics and math departments near the end of World War II. That funding and resources may be why I grew up where I did, as my father was hired by the U. of Chicago astronomy department around that time. 

Exploring Veblen House Genealogy

By chance and serendipity, through friends in Durham, NC, I learned of Patricia Brady, an expert genealogist who teaches at Rutgers University. After a career as a therapist, Pat has become an avid genealogist who has generously offered to explore the lineages of former owners of the Veblen House. 

She began by researching the Whiton-Stuarts--the idiosyncratic and once wealthy couple who moved the prefabricated house to Princeton in 1931, and had the house interior customized with oak trim and paneling. 

Now she is turning her expertise and energy to the lineages of Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen, 50 years after they made their last gift of land and home to the public. The Veblens donated the first nature preserve in Princeton and Mercer County: 82 acres for Herrontown Woods back in 1957. Then, when Elizabeth Veblen died fifty years ago, on January 26, 1974, the Veblen House and its 14 acres were added to Herrontown Woods. 

Thanks to Patricia for sharing her passion and knowledge, in exploring the history of those who made history. 

The Hidden Veblen

When we formed the Friends of Herrontown Woods in 2013, the nature preserve the Veblen's had donated 56 years prior for public use had become overgrown, their house and cottage boarded up. The same could be said for Oswald's legacy, which was nowhere to be found in the halls of Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study. There are many examples of Oswald Veblen--his influence and sometimes his very existence--going unmentioned. Here, from the annals of conspicuous omissions, are a couple examples, found recently while researching how Einstein ended up living in Princeton for the last two decades of his life. 

The wikipedia page for the Institute for Advanced Study makes clear Veblen's profound influence:

The eminent topologist Oswald Veblen at Princeton University, who had long been trying to found a high-level research institute in mathematics, urged Flexner to locate the new institute near Princeton where it would be close to an existing center of learning and a world-class library. In 1932 Veblen resigned from Princeton and became the first professor in the new Institute for Advanced Study. He selected most of the original faculty and also helped the institute acquire land in Princeton for both the original facility and future expansion.

But as of this writing, in December, 2023, no mention of Veblen can be found in Einstein's wikipedia entry, an omission that becomes all the more conspicuous when he is excluded from the list of initial faculty members:

Another example of the "hidden Veblens" is the wikipedia page for Owen Willans Richardson, the Nobel Prize-winning brother-in-law of Oswald. The entry mentions one of Owen's sisters, but not Elizabeth and Oswald.

This entry I was able to fix. Einstein's wikipedia page has some protections that may make it harder to edit.

Arrows Point to Veblen History

Herrontown Woods has long been home to arrowwood Viburnums--a native shrub--but on Mothers Day we added an "arrow tree," with arrows pointing to some of the significant places associated with the Veblens' lives and legacy. The arrows were beautifully crafted by Girl Scout Troop 71837, and our caretaker Andrew Thornton scavenged the tree post from among the many rot-resistant trunks of red cedars that still linger in the surrounding woods, long since shaded out by larger trees.

Perhaps some explanation of the arrows' varied destinations is in order.

Old Fine Hall was the original mathematics building at Princeton University, now called Jones Hall. Oswald Veblen is said to have designed the building, down to the stained glass mathematical equations in the windows. 

Valdres is the valley in Norway from which Oswald's grandparents immigrated to the U.S.. Oswald's father wrote a book about that valley and the Norwegians who came from there. 

Einstein's house is included because Einstein would come to Herrontown Woods to visit the Veblens. Einstein would not have moved to Princeton without the work and presence of Veblen, who did so much to help European scholars escape Nazi oppression and come to the U.S.

The yellow arrow facing away from the photo says "Iowa City," where Oswald grew up. His father was a professor of physics at the University of Iowa.

The Institute for Advanced Study is included because it was originally going to be located in Newark. Oswald reached out and successfully made the case that it should be located in Princeton, where it could benefit from synergy with the university. Oswald was the IAS's first faculty member, quickly followed by Einstein. Oswald was instrumental in choosing subsequent faculty members, such as John von Neumann. During its first three years, the Institute was located in Old Fine Hall, along with the Princeton University mathematics department.

The next two arrows point towards Veblen Cottage and Veblen House, which the Veblens acquired in 1936 and 1941, respectfully, and later donated for public use. The buildings have long sat empty (disrespectfully), but the Friends of Herrontown Woods is working to renovate them so that they can finally be utilized as the Veblens originally conceived.

The last arrow points towards York, England, where Elizabeth Veblen grew up. She moved to Princeton to help her brother Owen, who had a visiting position in the Princeton University physics department. Owen later was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work. Elizabeth was an avid gardener, and her central role in Princeton social circles is mentioned in the book, A Beautiful Mind. 

Thanks to Danielle Rollmann and her girlscout troop for creating these most enjoyable and informative arrows!

Historical Research Can Uncover Uncanny Coincidence

There are some aspects of my role in adopting Veblen House as a longterm project that border on the uncanny. Coincidence has accumulated as I've researched the people who lived in the house. The Veblen House itself, I realized at some point, has much in common with the house I grew up in. 

That house, next to Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, is now also named after a renowned scientist, the astronomer Otto Struve, and is similar in color to what the Veblen House was, and is at the end of a drive, surrounded by woods, 

Also echoing the Veblen House, it's even approached along a slightly curving walkway, down and to the left as one pulls into the driveway. 

Oswald Veblen came to Princeton after growing up in the midwest, as did I, and after having lived in a progression of university towns, as did I. His grandparents emigrated from Norway to Wisconsin, where I spent my childhood. His father's father built houses and barns, as did mine. His father was a physicist, mine an astrophysicist. Veblen got his PhD at the University of Chicago, where my father would later spend most of his career. It's likely that Veblen as a boy of 13 saw the 40 inch refracting telescope my father used--the world's largest refracting telescope--on exhibit at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago. I almost went to Carlton College, where Veblen's father and all of his aunts and uncles got degrees. I spent my childhood roaming the expansive grounds of Yerkes Observatory, where brilliant scientists lived on the outskirts of a small town with school colors orange and black, not unlike the circumstances of the Institute for Advanced Study, which Veblen helped to found on the outskirts of Princeton. 

As if these coincidences aren't enough, there's also the first owners of what would later be called the Veblen House, Jesse and Mary Whiton-Stuart, who lived their last years in towns I have familial connections to--San Luis-Obispo, CA and Tucson, AZ, the latter being where we'd go as part of my father's work at nearby Kitt Peak Observatory.

And then there's the uncanny coincidence that came to light when I began researching the origins of the house in Ann Arbor where I lived for many years. It was built and lived in by Walter Colby, a nuclear physicist who in many ways played the same role at U. of Michigan that Veblen played in Princeton, bringing brilliant scholars from Europe to raise the level of science and math in the U.S. They had parallel lives, born in the same year, retiring the same year, their legacies largely forgotten and in need of rediscovery. Neither had children, and both played important military roles in World Wars I and II. Both were married to women who also led singular lives, and tended to beautiful gardens. 

The Origin Story for Norwegian Emigration to America

Thanks to Norma Smith, wife of retired physics professor Stewart Smith, we now have not only the origin story for Einstein begonias, but also the origin story for emigration from Norway to America. Oswald Veblen's ancestors were very much a part of that emigration. Norma mentioned to me the Restauration, which looked at first like a misspelling but upon further research turned out to be the ship that carried the first organized group of immigrants from Norway to the U.S. Their overloaded sloop landed in New York on October 9, 1825, after a three month voyage. That date, October 9, was considered so seminal that it would later be declared Leif Erikson Day, after the first European to lead a voyage to North America, about 500 years before Columbus. 

Oswald Veblen's paternal grandparents joined that emigration two decades later, in 1847, leaving their ancestral home in the Valdres valley to then homestead in Wisconsin. 

It's interesting to note that that first momentous emigration from Norway to the U.S. was not populated by Lutherans--the dominant religion in Norway--but by Norwegians seeking to escape persecution for their non-Lutheran faith. 

The man who organized that first ship full of Norwegians was a character named Cleng Peerson. An article at NorwayHeritage.com describes the sequence of events that led to this first organized Norwegian emigration to America since Leif Erikson's journey around the year 1000. During the war 1807-1814, some Norwegians who supported Napolean Bonaparte were captured by the British. Influenced by the Quakers they met in prison, they later returned to Norway with new religious leanings. Persecuted in Norway for straying from the Lutheran faith, they sent Cleng Peerson and one other Quaker to explore opportunities in America. Only Peerson survived the trip, and the stories he told upon returning to Norway inspired the voyage of the Restauration the following year. 

A pamphlet Norma picked up in Norway, from which this photo is taken, describes the beginning of Norwegian emigration to America as having been motivated by difficult living conditions, in addition to the religious persecution. 

Cleng Peerson's role as "father of Norwegian emigration to America" could be seen as heroic, and yet a description of him that the pamphlet quotes is down to earth, even hilarious:

"Heavy work was not his forte, but he never tried to take advantage of others. He worked for the benefit of all, but often in such an impractical manner that few, if any, thanked him for his work." 

Sometimes it can be a blessing not to be good at the sorts of things you really best not be doing. Cleng sounds like the sort who was selfless yet was not making himself particularly useful, and so was perfectly suited to leave his community in Norway to scout out possibilities for a better life in America.

Research has revealed several events that intersected with the Veblens' lives. A replica of a Viking ship was built in Norway and sailed to Chicago in time for the 1893 Columbian World's Fair. Oswald and his father Andrew would surely have witnessed its subversive presence, questioning as it did the celebration of Columbus as the first European to discover America. An obituary states that Andrew, a physicist at the University of Iowa, was "twice called as an electrical consultant for the world's fair of 1893."

Andrew's obituary states further that "since his retirement in 1905 (he) devoted nearly all his time to work touching on Norse folk lore, tradition and history, and a family genealogy, for which he had collected material over a period of 25 years. A first edition of the volume was published in 1925."

That publishing date of 1925 was surely timed for Minnesota's 1925 hosting of the Norse-American Centennial, celebrating the Restauration's arrival in NY 100 years prior. Oswald's father lived until 1932, long enough to see both Wisconsin and Minnesota declare Leif Erikson Day a state holiday. 

Contents of the 1974 Auction of the Veblen's Possessions

In preparation for traveling to England this month, where I'm hoping to meet relatives of Elizabeth Veblen, I am collecting everything I've found about Elizabeth and the Richardson family into which she was born. 

Originally appearing in the July 25 Town Topics, below is a list found on Papers of Princeton of items that were auctioned off from Veblen House after Elizabeth died. She had continued to live in the house after Oswald died in 1960. The auction was held on August 1, 1974. I was once told that entering the Veblen House was like returning to the 1920s. This list gives a rich portrait of a house filled with beautiful rugs, furniture, and china, much of which was likely acquired during their many trips to Europe. 

The list also includes "trunks of Einstein" -- further evidence of Veblen's close friendship with Einstein. A trunk is also mentioned in an interview later on of Veblen's close colleague, Deane Montgomery:

"at the time Mrs. Veblen died I was the executor of the estate. I didn't go to the auction of the effects, but one of them was some old second-hand trunk with the name Einstein on it that he'd left in their place in storage." 

Also on the list is mention of the Charles Oppenheimer paintings, which we had previously thought were to be left with the house. Elizabeth's will states, "I give and bequeath all of my pictures, radio receivers and phonograph records to the said County, to be kept by it in the house herein devised as a part of the proposed library and museum of Herrontown Woods." The pictures the will refers to may be photographs Oswald took later in life, documenting Elizabeth's beautiful gardens. It clearly didn't mean the paintings. More on the Oppenheimer paintings in a previous post.

Below is a transcription of the 1974 notice in the paper: 

Fine Antiques — Beautiful China and Glass

Estate of Mrs. Oswald Veblen 

PUBLIC AUCTION

Many of the late mathematician

Italian American Sportsman Club, Princeton, N.J.

500 Terhune Rd. (off N. Harrison St.)

Thurs. Aug. I—9 AM 

Exhibit Wed. July 31

1790 Mahog. Grandfather's clock; 18th century tilt, card and drop leaf tables; good 1790 slant top desk; Chippendale shaving mirror and desk; 2 sets Sheraton chairs; rare 1675 oak storage bench; 1790 Am inlaid hunt board; lovely small 1790 English sideboard; early mahog. 2 pedestal dining table; good 1780 Butlers bureau; early stands; Vict, bureaus, stands, loveseat and towel rack; Jenny Lind bed; rosewood tea caddy; lovely custom reproduction furniture; Jacobean chest; 25 fine old oriental rugs; 10 Mexican rugs; Charles Oppenheimer paintings; rare old prints and engravings; scholar's library ineluding good leather bound; antique fire tools; Bayre lion Bronze; lovely cut, Bohemian and Venetian glass, important Copenhagen, Satsuma. Wedgewood, Irish Belleek, Minton, Brookwood. Chelsea, old Paris gold band and other beautiful china; etc!! Interesting attics contents ineluding trunks of Einstein and other memorabilia! 

Lester and Robert Slatoff - Auctioneers 

Trenton (609) 393-4848

On Juneteenth, A Post From the Past

Just two days ago, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. The title suggests that we can all feel more free because of Juneteenth. Though it primarily commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, it's also been described as serving "as a moment to honor and celebrate black excellence." I can relate to that, as a jazz musician, having spent long and pleasurable hours listening to and transcribing the solos of many of the greats: Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Don Byas, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Sonny Rollins. 

Now, immersed in the history and the restorational logistics of Veblen House, what connection can be found between African American excellence and the Veblens, whose ancestry is Norwegian and English? 

The question sends us back to the VeblenHouse.org archives for a 2017 post entitled "Math Writ Large in Hidden Figures." It's a story of surprising connections that begins like this: 

"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 rest of the story is at this link. 

What Einstein, Veblen, and Cicadas Have in Common

In this collage of Princeton Alumni magazines, Oswald Veblen finds himself framed by two miraculous companions: Albert Einstein and the Miracicada that currently has Princeton all abuzz. What do they have in common other than being miraculous? They have both spent time at Herrontown Woods. Veblen and Einstein were the first two professors at the Institute for Advanced Study, and remained good friends. The Miracicadas were singing in 1936 when Veblen bought what we now call the Veblen Cottage--an 1875 farmstead that became Veblen's study, often visited by Einstein and other friends. That purchase, which later became the core of Herrontown Woods, can be considered a starting point for the Princeton open space movement. By that measure, the movement to preserve open space reached five cicada generations old this year. Though the cicadas only come out of the ground once every 17 years, Veblen may have considered them friends as well, and as a mathematician surely took an interest in the primeness of their periodicity.

Update: In a letter to the Princeton Alumni Magazine about this, I noted that the author of the PAW's article on cicadas, Elyse Graham, was also the author of the PAW's past articles about Veblen, Adventures in Fine Hall and The Power of Small Numbers.

The Veblens' Oppenheimer Paintings

There were at least two Oppenheimers in Oswald Veblen's life. One was the well known physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, who became director of the IAS after WWII. The other is the painter Charles Oppenheimer, who painted at least two of the paintings that hung in the Veblens' living room. Though most of this post is about Charles, there will later come reason to believe that Robert may have left behind a painting or two.

 
We've been fortunate to track down photos of the interior of the Veblen House from when the Veblens were living there. Oswald took an interest in photography later in his life. Considering that the Veblens' will called for their pictures to become part of a museum at the house, this appears to have been a conscious effort on his part to document their life, the house, and garden.

Given that Oswald was the one behind the camera, this reflection in the painting in the photo above is about as close as we're likely to get to a photograph of him at Veblen House. 

The painting itself was most likely painted by Charles Oppenheimer, a British painter and contemporary of the Veblens. My curiosity about the painting for years had gone no further than that, but a graphic artist and friend of our Veblen House project was moved to track down the subject of the painting. 

Given Alison's art background and skills at delving into the richness of the web, it wasn't long before she came up with the setting: the Piazza delle Erbe, a square in Verona, in northern Italy. This fits with a description of Oppenheimer's time in Italy:

While in Italy Oppenheimer painted the architecture of Florence, Verona and Venice, capturing the atmosphere of these old Italian cities.

One internet source describes Oppenheimer's trip to northern Italy in 1912, which may have been when this painting was made. 

Veblen's photo of another corner of the living room shows another painting on the wall. 

It shows what appears to be a tree overhanging a river, not unlike some landscapes Oppenheimer painted near his home in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, 

like this one. 

There are a couple echoes from Oswald Veblen's life in Oppenheimer's life and paintings. Veblen grew up overlooking the Iowa River, which meanders through Iowa City. And in WW II the army conducted some of its military exercises near Kirkcudbright. Veblen played important roles in both world wars, leading groups of mathematicians and physicists to improve the accuracy of artillery. Like Veblen, Oppenheimer was drawn to both the natural and the built environment. 

There was another painting in the Veblens' living room that we have yet to find a photo of. It hung above the fireplace. All we know of it thus far is a description given by Bob Wells, who rented the Veblen House from about 1975 to 1998, and raised his family there. 

Bob described the painting as a desert, with scrub rather than cacti, with a view from a rise out across a broad valley, with mountains in the distance. Bob would sit there in the evening and gaze at that painting and let his imagination go. He had always believed it to have been painted by Robert Oppenheimer of the IAS, during his time at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and was surprised by my suggestion that it was painted instead by Charles Oppenheimer. Bob mentioned a neighbor of his, two doors up, who is a very talented painter, and might be able to recreate the painting if we could find an image. 

It seems unlikely that Charles Oppenheimer would have had occasion to paint a desert scene. Robert Oppenheimer's mother was a painter, and owned works by Picasso and van Gogh. It's possible Robert picked up some painting skills along the way.

Update: The mystery of the painting above the fireplace has been solved. It was painted by Kate Cory, of a landscape near Prescott, Arizona. We still have no image of the painting, however.

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.

Oswald Veblen's Legacy Celebrated in Princeton University's 2020 State of the University Report

(This is a repost from the companion site, FOHW.org, Friends of Herrontown Woods)

2020 is looking like a good year for Oswald Veblen, whose 140th birthday we'll be celebrating in June. For those who like numbers, mathematicians or not, Veblen's life and career are framed by round numbers. He was born in 1880, began graduate work in mathematics in 1900, became emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1950, and died at his Brookin, Maine cottage in 1960.

Some deeply gratifying news came recently in the form of Princeton University's annual State of the University letter, in which President Eisgruber puts the legacy of Oswald Veblen front and center in a moving discourse on "the values and qualities that define us as a university."

Eisgruber describes Veblen as "a faculty member with tremendous vision and constructive energy" who "probably did as much as anyone to reform and improve this University." That's some high praise.

As Princeton University embarks on a new round of building, President Eisgruber pointed to Veblen's visionary role nearly a century ago:

"At a time when many Princeton professors had no offices and worked from home, Veblen imagined something novel: a building dedicated to mathematics and designed to generate intellectual community and exchange."

"Oswald Veblen understood that people are the heart and soul of a great university, and he also understood that thoughtfully designed buildings can stimulate the collaborations, activity, insights, and friendships that animate a scholarly community. His vision for the old Fine Hall, and its timely completion, attracted brilliant thinkers to Princeton and forged a scholarly legacy that remains vibrant almost a century later."

Citing Elyse Graham's articles in the Princeton Alumni Weekly about Veblen, the State of the University report also praises "Veblen's humanitarian courage," demonstrated through his early efforts to aid the careers of brilliant women and African American mathematicians, and his

"critical role in rescuing Jewish scholars from persecution in Europe. Veblen worked with the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars to accommodate refugees at Princeton and elsewhere in the country. The scholars whom Veblen helped bring to Princeton included professors of mathematics, physics, economics, and art history."

The Friends of Herrontown Woods first heard that Veblen would be featured in the President's report a couple weeks prior, when the university's science writer contacted us to ask permission to use some of the photos on our VeblenHouse.org website. As our nonprofit begins repairs on the long-neglected Veblen House and Cottage in Herrontown Woods, we are tremendously heartened to witness the ongoing rediscovery of Oswald Veblen's quietly extraordinary legacy, beginning with writings and presentations by George Dyson and others at the Turing Centennial Conference in 2012, articles by Alyse Graham in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and now this wonderful tribute to Veblen woven into President Eisgruber's State of the University letter.

Oswald Veblen's Early Days in Iowa

On this day, when Iowa once again exercises its outsized influence on the fate of presidential candidates, here's some research on how Oswald Veblen's childhood in Iowa may have influenced his values and his life. In a career packed with accomplishments, he was driven by multiple passions--for mathematics of course, and the advancement of American academia generally, but also for land and for buildings that could bring people together. Having achieved a position of influence, he used it to help countless others advance their careers, apparently unburdened by the racial and gender prejudices common in his time. He used it also to advance institutions and technology, most notably early steps in the development of computers.

Veblen was born and came of age as the country itself was coming of age, in that 30 year span called the Gilded Age, marked by industrialization and growth at the end of the 19th century. By age 20, neatly coinciding with the dawn of the 20th century and reflecting the urgency of the era, he had already gained two B.A. degrees, and was headed to Chicago for graduate work.

Most biographical writings about Veblen dispense with his early years in a paragraph or two, but a trip back to his beginnings reveals how Iowa exercised an outsized influence on what Veblen would later achieve. His four years at what was then called the State University of Iowa would be particularly influential, but this post will focus on the landscapes and buildings that framed his pre-college years, with music providing a brief meander, like the Iowa River he looked out upon from the windows of his childhood home.

It's good to start with a question or two. What, for instance, drove Veblen, a mathematics professor at Princeton, to insist on "supervising every last detail of construction" of Old Fine Hall, and what drove him to overcome opposition and convince the Institute for Advanced Study to acquire 600 acres that would ultimately become the Institute Woods? The degree of his passion for land and buildings is well expressed by Abraham Flexner: "The prospect of a visit from an architect usually cost Professor Veblen a day's work and a night's sleep ... He is a most excellent person, but the word 'building' or 'farm' has an intoxicating effect upon him."

Here, then, are some seeds from which a life grew.

Iowa, for most people, probably conjures images of a flat or gently rolling land of crowded cornstalks and scattered farmers whose opinions loom large every four years when presidential candidates come a'calling. Less known is another Iowa, of "abundant rock outcroppings," of "deep, narrow valleys containing cool, fast-flowing streams" and "unexpectedly scenic landscapes." Tucked into what's been called the "Switzerland of Iowa", a geologic region known as the Paleozoic Plateau at the extreme northeastern corner of the state (the red area on the map), is a town named Decorah, where Oswald Veblen was born.

By the time Oswald arrived on the scene in 1880, his father Andrew had received a masters degree from Carlton College in Minnesota, and had moved to Decorah to teach physics and english at Luther College. Andrew had married Kirsti Hougen, who had grown up near the Valdres Valley in Norway from which Andrew's parents had immigrated a generation earlier. Oswald, then, was the first child born into a family with deep Norwegian roots, living at the time in the center of Norwegian immigrant culture in America. Decorah is not only the home of Luther College, conceived by Norwegian Lutherans in 1857, but also the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum, with the most extensive collection of Norwegian-American artifacts in the world.

Along with the forests, abundant water and beauty that must have attracted Norwegians to that part of Iowa, a few other parallels can be drawn between where Oswald was born and the Princeton Ridge where he lived the last 20 years of his life. Like northeastern Iowa's bluff country, Herrontown Woods escaped the flattening effect of the glaciers, and has rock outcroppings and abundant springs. In their wills, the Veblens left behind some artifacts to be part of a "museum and library" at Veblen House.

When I mentioned Decorah to some friends who live in Iowa City, they made the astonishing claim that The New World Symphony--one of my favorites--was composed there. How could a Czech composer end up in Iowa? On the other hand, how did a Czech composer manage to so aptly capture the spirit of America in a symphony?

What appears to be true, after some digging, is that Antonin Dvorak composed the symphony early in a three year stint in the U.S. beginning in 1892. One year in, on the advice of his secretary, a homesick Dvorak headed not back to Europe for a summer break, but instead traveled with his family to a Bohemian enclave in Iowa. There they spent the summer of 1893 in a town not far from Decorah named Spillville, where Dvorak found a home away from home among many Czech immigrants, and soaked up the sounds and vast spaces of the American midwest. One of the string quartets he composed while there includes the song of the scarlet tanager.

Dvorak's visit to the midwest coincided with a momentous time in American history, during which he could hear the sounds of Native American music, played by Iroquois Indians who lived just outside of town, and then travel to Chicago to witness the latest inventions at the Chicago World's Fair. All of this must have seeped into his composing of the New World Symphony, which he completed while living in Spillville.

This mix of the ancient and the modern must also have seeped into Oswald Veblen, by this time 13 and living in Iowa City just to the south. Oswald's family hadn't stayed long in Decorah. In 1881, when Oswald was one year old, his family moved to Baltimore, where his father received two years' training at Johns Hopkins University before taking a position as professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Iowa. Oswald would live in Iowa City for the next 16 years, gaining seven siblings and two degrees.

Fittingly, given Oswald's future as a visionary who loved buildings and nature, the family home in Iowa City had a view, standing atop Mill Hill--a long hill overlooking the Iowa River--the same hill where later would stand the famed Iowa Writers Workshop. The address of the Veblen home was 707 N. Dubuque St. Though we have yet to track down a photo, it was by all accounts an attractive house, surely substantial to house a family of ten.

Here's a description by Dan Campion, an Iowa City writer who I reached out to after seeing his letter in the U. of Chicago alumni magazine, calling for the preservation of Yerkes Observatory, where I grew up.

"The Veblen house must've been a showplace. The site overlooks a stretch of the Iowa River downstream (south) of a bight and about a third to a half a mile north of the center of campus."

Most of what we know about Oswald's childhood home comes from the newspaper columns of historian Irving Weber. By Weber's description, the house had a career of its own, hosting a progression of owners following the departure of the Veblens from Iowa City in 1906.

Weber writes: 

This had been the lovely La Place Bostwick home, and the tea room was called Wisteria because of the beautiful wisteria flowers, droopy clusters of showy, purple blooms on the front of the house. Interestingly, the house, located at the top of the long Dubuque Street hill, had been known as "The House of Mystery" (1908-1918) when Bostwick lived there and invested $25,000 for construction of the 40-by-60-foot laboratory building in back to artificially produce pearls, using clams. Two thousand clams were dredged from the Iowa River, just below the Coralville Dam, and were implanted with a tiny pellet of clam shell (as an irritant to start the pearl). Iowa River water was constantly pumped over the clams in the laboratory tank, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In four years, Bostwick reaped his first harvest of pearls--round, of good quality, weighing 10 grams. 

The "House of Mystery" has echoes of H.G. Wells' novels published only a decade prior, like The Invisible Man, in which a man secretly manipulates nature in a way no one else had ever imagined.

From 1925-26, while Elizabeth Veblen would have been hosting teas in Princeton and growing wisteria in her garden, Oswald's childhood home in Iowa City was busy being one of several Tea Houses in Iowa City operated by women during the Prohibition era. Soon thereafter the house was displaced by the Sigma Chi fraternity and reportedly moved in 1928 to another location, as yet unknown.

Another building that may have had a big effect on Oswald was the Grammar School, an impressive structure built in 1893 at the northeast corner of Van Buren and Jefferson streets. Such edifices must have loomed large in the predominantly rural landscape of Iowa, and surely made an impression on a young Veblen.

Oswald would likely have been a student there only a year before moving on to the university at the tender age of 14, but the flush of new facilities he experienced just before leaving high school may have influenced his campaigns later in life to secure good facilities for Princeton's math department and the Institute for Advanced Study.

For his college education, Oswald looked no further than the State University of Iowa, where his father Andrew was a professor with a long beard and a reputation for high standards.

Deane Montgomery, a former faculty member at the IAS and close friend of Veblen's, offered a few insights about those Iowa City college days in Veblen's obituary for the American Mathematical Society: "As a student he won a prize in mathematics and another in sharpshooting. During these early years he took a trip by boat down the Iowa and Mississippi rivers and he often spoke of this trip with pleasure."

Additional research that I have yet to write up suggests that loss--of buildings and landscape--may also have made a big impression on Veblen in his early days. There was the ancestral Veblen land in Norway lost two generations earlier, reportedly to unscrupulous lawyers, but Oswald himself appears to have directly witnessed two great losses in his youth. One was the fire that consumed the university library--a much loved structure with many irreplaceable books. Another was the university green, an area of open space on campus that was progressively lost to buildings for lack of foresight by leaders who had failed to acquire more land early on to accommodate the university's future growth. 

Of all these elements--family tradition, the great outdoors and great indoors, precocious achievement, tragic loss and steady gain--Oswald Veblen was made. 

Thanks to the Iowa City Library and the State Historical Society for assistance in this research.

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.

When the Body Teaches the Mind

I had a Veblenesque experience recently when the opportunity came along to play the role of mentor. It began when a young man named Mariano showed some interest in learning how to chop wood. He's 16 and was visiting from Buenos Aires, where the opportunities to chop wood surely are few. Yet wood is enshrined in Argentinian culture as the fuel for asado--an often elaborate barbecue in restaurants and backyards that connects urban culture to its pastoral roots of cow-herding gauchos roaming the pampas.

Part of what makes Oswald Veblen distinct among scholars is the strong pastoral sensibility he carried with him into academia. There was his youth spent in Iowa, and before that the farms that his father grew up on--a progression of farms hewed from the wilds of the Wisconsin and Minnesota frontiers by Oswald's Norwegian immigrant grandfather. How might this heritage have influenced Veblen and the town, university, and Institute he so actively inhabited?

My new friend Mariano saw the abundant stacked firewood in our backyard, and asked how I managed to split it all. It was a curious process, teaching him to chop wood, because when I tried to explain how to do it, I realized I didn't really know. My body knows, however, so in order to teach his body how to chop wood, I needed to consult with my own, and then translate my muscles' memory and wisdom into instructions that he could then communicate to his own body. In other words, our minds were mere conduits for knowledge stored in one body that needed to become learned by another.

My body taught me how to hold the axe, how to slide the left hand down the handle as I raise the axe above my head, how to position the legs and use the larger muscle groups to gain power, all of which I then passed along to him. It took awhile for his muscles to catch on. Learning is sometimes a process of finding out how many ways one can do something wrong before the body agrees to do it right. Before long, he had become accurate enough in his swing to split the wood in two, and showed tremendous satisfaction in the accomplishment.

That I know how to split wood at all owes most likely to my father, who became an astronomer after growing up on a farm in northeastern Ohio. My grandfather, like Veblen's, was a farmer and carpenter. That physicality and tradition of building/growing I have then carried forward into an increasingly urbanized world. It can be said to be a heritage and set of skills passed not mind to mind but body to body, and comes in handy if you happen to buy a house with a woodstove, or wish to repair another physical legacy: the house and cottage the Veblens left to the public trust.

This interplay between body and mind can be seen at many levels in Oswald Veblen's life and legacy. Veblen did a lot of mentoring of young mathematicians in his day, but his intellectual pursuits were deeply connected to a passion for the physical world. That passion can be seen in his love of woodchopping, of the buildings he brought into being, and of the nature he worked to preserve.

We don't have a photo of Veblen with an axe, but we know he liked to lead his colleagues at the Institute on brush-clearing expeditions in the Institute Woods--the land he did so much to acquire for the Institute in the 1930s and 40s. Among his brilliant recruits for woodchopping was Paul Dirac, known as "the Mozart of Science," who carried on the tradition after Veblen was gone.

The grounds around Veblen's house, across town from the Institute, included great piles of firewood--the product of caretaker Max Latterman's labors. That wood fueled the woodstove in the cottage, where Veblen had his study, and the fireplace in the Veblen House.

The firewood is long gone, but the buildings Veblen helped bring into being-- the university's Jones Hall, and Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study--still stand. Those buildings can be seen as bodies, designed to support and inform the intellectual missions of the University and the Institute. Without Veblen's vision and persistence, the Institute for Advanced Study might have remained without a "body" to inhabit, since its other originators thought the Institute could exist without any actual buildings to house it. And it was Veblen's design of Jones Hall (originally called Fine Hall) that brought together mathematicians who had previously been working out of their homes.

The nature Veblen worked to preserve--600 acres for the Institute Woods and 100 acres for Herrontown Woods--is also a body, to be walked through and interacted with.

As people become more urbanized and lose touch with the mechanics of living off the land, trees tend to get romanticized, to the point that a saw and an axe can seem to be the enemy. The slaughter of mature forests worldwide has intensified this view, but utilizing the trees that come down in our "urban forest" brings a deeper level of understanding and appreciation. There's a lot to learn about the wood. Straight-grained trees like ash or red maple, black locust or red oak, split relatively easily, but each section of trunk or branch is different. Some have knots that resist splitting. Some sections of the tree may have been under stress due to the tilt of the tree--a stress that manifests as a more twisted grain that's harder to split. Small cracks in the wood can give clues as to where to aim the axe. Sometimes a section that should split easily does not. If the wood doesn't split on the first stroke, the sound the wood makes when struck can indicate whether it's worth persisting. There's a deep sound that is beautiful to the ear of a wood splitter. That sound says the wood is ready to split and will succumb with another blow or two.

Part of the mentoring of Mariano was to listen for that sound, as we prepared the bodies of trees to feed the woodstove that helps heat the home I inhabit, which in turn inhabits and gives back to the body of nature. In this way, the body in all its manifestations forms and informs our world.

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

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.