Speculative Reference Candidates for Who's Next

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

(If Naumann's revelations were correct, and the protagonist were to be an
historical person, and I were right... not likely. However:)

"In 1901 Ehrenfest moved to Goettingen where he studied under Klein and
Hilbert. There he took Max Abraham's course on the electromagnetic theory
of light and also attended courses by Stark, Walther Nernst, Schwarzschild
and Zermelo. While attending courses by Klein and Hilbert, Ehrenfest saw a
young Russian student of mathematics Tatyana Alexeyevna Afnassjewa [sic].
He wondered why she did not come to meetings of the mathematics club but
then discovered that the reason was that women were not allowed to attend.
Ehrenfest challenged this rule and, after quite a battle, was able to get
the rule changed. It was the beginning of their friendship which led
eventually to their marriage."
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Ehrenfest.html

In 1932 in Copenhagen Niels Bohr and his friends presented a
parody of "Faust", in which Bohr played God, and Wolfgang
Pauli-Mephistopheles tried to sell to the unbelieving Paul
Ehrenfest-Faust the idea of neutrino. Next year Ehrenfest
committed a suicide, believing that quantum mechanics was of
the Devil.

Summarized from Kari Enqvist's (very critical) review of the
Finnish translation of "Prométhée, Faust, Frankenstein: fondements
imaginaires de l'éthique" by Dominique Lecourt.
http://www.tsv.fi/ttapaht/028/enqvist.pdf


"[John/Janos] von Neumann (1903-1955) had been born and trained as a
mathematician in Hungary, but his mathematical style became mature during
his time at Goettingen and with David Hilbert in 1926-1927. His work there
on the foundations of quantum mechanics led him to give the first abstract
definition of Hilbert space, prove the spectral theorem for unbounded
operators, and do many other things. On account of this work, Oswald
Veblen brought him to Princeton in 1930, and in the years 1930-1933 von
Neumann spent half his time as a professor at Princeton, and half his time
as a Privatdozent in Berlin.
   Statistical mechanics and thermodynamics form a theme in much of von
Neumann's work, and especially in his work on quantum mechanics in the
period just before 1930. He talked about these with his Berlin colleagues
Richard von Mises and Eugene Wigner, and his 1929 article on the
quantum-mechanical ergodic theorem shows that he had read the article on
the conceptual foundations of statistical mechanics by Paul and Tatiana
Ehrenfest in the Enzyklopaedie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften."
http://www.google.fi/search?q=cache:gWdzxZtgVc8J:www.math.uchicago.edu/~mfrank/erg.ps+&hl=en
[Cf. the "Hungary between the wars" rumor. Later von Neumann was,
of course, involved with the Manhattan Project.]

"George E. Uhlenbeck (1900-1988)
[...]
Early education [...] in the Hague [...] primarily influenced by his
high school physics teacher (A.H. Borgesius) who had a PhD and had
published.
[...]
1919-22, U. Leiden, Physics & Math (Ehrenfest) [Before studying under
Ehrenfest, a great teacher, he was introduced Paul and Tatiana
Ehrenfest's encyclopedia article on statistical mechanics. "That was a
real revelation. I began to see what Boltzmann was up to." Pais, A.,
"George Uhlenbeck and the discovery of electron spin", Physics Today,
40, (1989), pp. 36.]
[...]
1925, U. Leiden, Assistant to Paul Ehrenfest
10/17/1925, Paper on Discovery of Spin [with Samuel Goudsmit]
1927, Copenhagen & U. Gottingen
7/7/1927, Ph.D., U. Leiden (Ehrenfest)
[...]"
http://www.davebruns.com/Influential_Physicists6.html

"Ehrenfest had written [to Uhlenbeck in Rome] a letter in which he said:
'I have read an article [on ergodic theory that was greatly influenced by
the Ehrenfests' "Conceptual Foundations"] by a young man, it looks nice
and one ought to try and see him'. Well, in those days, when your
professor
wrote you, you did it. And George Uhlenbeck went to see that young man;
the young man just came back from Germany and was totally discouraged. He
had spent a semester in Goettingen and there they had given him a treatment:
'Well that man cannot know anything, besides being too small he never
studied anyplace worthwhile'. So the young man really got discouraged and
meant to give up physics. But Uhlenbeck said: 'Don't do that before you
first talk to Ehrenfest; come and see Ehrenfest.' And the man came to
Leiden and stayed for two or three months with Ehrenfest, of which I can
show a picture. A well-known picture that you may have seen before: there
is that young man, Enrico Fermi. And under Ehrenfest's encouragement it
dawned on him that he really was a competent physicist. And if you look
at Fermi's career ....... those are the days in which he really became a
great physicist."
>From "The discovery of the electron spin", S.A. Goudsmit
http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/history/spin/goudsmit.html



Have mercy,
Heikki