It must be hard to digest, in an era where the United States of America is the Torchbearer of Science and Technology, the fact that most American Universities and the people at large despised Mathematics during the Nineteenth and early years of the Twentieth Century.
Yale refused for seven years to pay a salary to the physicist Willard Gibbs (best-known for the Gibbs effect seen when Fourier-analysing a discontinuous function), already famous in Europe, on the grounds that his studies were "irrelevant." Woodrow Wilson, the President of the USA from 1913 to 1921, had the opinion about Mathematics that "the natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill."
This was at a time when a revolution in mathematics and physics was taking place three thousand miles away in such intellectual centers as Gottingen, Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, Paris and Rome. John D. Davies, a historian of science, writes of a dramatic revolution in the understanding of the very nature of matter :
The absolute world of classical Newtonian physics was breaking down and intellectual ferment was everywhere. Then in 1905 an unknown theoretician in the Berne patent office, Albert Einstein, published four epoch-making papers coimparable to Newton’s instant leap into fame.
Around the same time, the German mathematical genius David Hilbert and his disciples (among them the two stellar Hungarian physicists John Von Neumann “the last of the great Mathematicians”,who was later a key member of the Manhattan Project and Hermann Weyl) triggered a powerful impulse to apply mathematics to unamenable problems ranging from the “new physics” of Quantum Mechanics to logic and the new theory of games.
When Europe had three dozen chaired professors who did little except create new mathematics, America had none. Young Americans had to travel to Europe to get training beyond the B.A.
But America fortunately remembered what its Founding Father Benjamin Franklin had once said, “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
Aware of the scientific revolution sweeping Europe, the Rockfeller Foundation and its offshoots started by sending American graduate students, including Robert Oppenheimer (later known as the Father of the Atom Bomb), abroad. By the mid-1920s, they decided that “instead of sending Mahomet to the Mountain, it would fetch the Mountain here.” That is, the foundation decided to import Europeans. The foundation selected three American universities, among them Princeton, to receive the bulk of its largesse.
Among the first Europeans to arrive in Princeton in 1930 were Neumann, Weyl and Eugene Wigner, the physicist who went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics in 1963, not for his vital work on the Atom Bomb but for research on the structure of atom and its nucleus. Another and more powerful worldwide search for stars was started by the deep pocketed and zealous Bambergers, who were department store merchants of Newark. Dangling unheard-of salaries, lavish perks and the promise of complete independence, they brought to America, among other academic superstars, “The pope of physics” Albert Einstein after three years of delicate negotiation.
But this flow of European scholars had a rippling effect with the mass expulsion of Jews from German universities by Nazis and growing fears of another world war, since by then Hitler had taken over the German government. With shrinking opportunities for research in Europe during the Depression and then the Holocaust, the visiting professors stayed back in America. Practically overnight, Princeton had become the new Gottingen. It became to mathematicians what Paris was once to painters and novelists, Vienna to psychoanalysts and architects, and ancient Athens to philosophers and playwrights.
Even that college at the far end of Cambridge in Massachusetts, MIT, modeled as a polytechnic institute became the worldwide center of engineering later on. Then there was Carnegie Institute of Technology, the name for Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. It was first called the Carnegie Technical Schools, or Carnegie Tech, when it was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie who intended to build a “first class technical school” in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the sons of local steel mill workers. In the early years the ivory-colored brick of its buildings – designed, or so students said, to serve as factories should the school fail – were glazed yellow black from the smog caused by surrounding smelters and power plants. Its walkways were gritty with soot particles the size of pebbles. Its students were forced, before a lecture was half over, to brush the cinders from their lecture notes. Even at high noon in midsummer, one could stare directly at the sun without blinking. In that era, before America’s emergence as an academic hub, Carnegie Tech was shunned by the local ruling elite, which rather sent its children east to Harvard. Today, CIT has seven departments of study and is consistently ranked one of the top ten engineering programs in the nation and the world.
Most people now think that USA’s rise to scientific prominence was a by-product of World War II. The invention of the Atom bomb gave enormous prestige to Einstein’s Relativity Theory, which before then had been seen as a small correction of the still-valuable Newtonian Mechanics. In his autobiography “Made in Japan”, Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corporation writes about his reaction to the Hiroshima bombing. At the time he was in the navy as a scientist trying to perfect thermal-guidance weapons and night-vision gunsights. He was having lunch with his navy colleagues, when he heard the news :
I knew something about the potential of atomic power, but I thought it would take at least twenty years for an atomic bomb to be developed, and it was shocking to realize that the Americans had done it. It was obvious that if the Americans had come this far, our technology had to be primitive in comparison…..The technology gap it represented was tremendous.
With excerpts from A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, Made in Japan by Akio Morita. References nuclearweaponarchive.org, press.princeton.edu, www.ias.edu, Wikipedia.org, Nobelprize.org, www.ams.org
