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How one German city developed – and then lost – generations of math geniuses
There are two things that connect the names Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert and Noether.
- David Gunderman
- The National Interest
One is their outstanding breadth of contributions to the field of mathematics.
The other is that each was a professor at the same university in Göttingen, Germany.
Although relatively unknown today, Göttingen, a small German university town, was for a time one of the most productive centers of mathematics in history.
Göttingen’s rise to mathematical primacy occurred over generations, but its fall took less than a decade when its stars were pushed abroad by the advent of National Socialism, the…