9 - Mathematics and the Social Order

Summary

Dear, my dislike for Europe has nothing to do with Mariette. I feel the opposite of a nostalgia for Europe, because every corner I knew reminds me of the world, of the society, of the excitingly nebulous expectations of my childhood…of a world which is gone, and the ruins of which are no solace…My second reason for disliking Europe is the memory of my total disillusionment in human decency between 1933 and September 1938, the advent of Nazism and the reaction of humanity to it – in that period I suffered my life's greatest emotional shock…

John von Neumann to Klari von Neumann, Thursday (no date), 1949

From Berlin to Princeton

Notwithstanding the fact that his family had nominally converted to Christianity upon the death of the father in 1923, in the climate of the late 1920s, von Neumann knew that his chances of obtaining a chair in mathematics in Germany or Hungary were negligible. Socially, he was still perceived as Jewish, and that in a Germany where many dozents were competing for promotion. Stan Ulam also remembered him speaking of the worsening political situation, which made him doubt that intellectual life could be pursued comfortably. Thus, von Neumann readily accepted when, at the beginning of the 1930s, Oswald Veblen, Princeton mathematician and occasional visitor to Göttingen, arranged to have him spend six months per year at Princeton. For the next two years, von Neumann commuted from Berlin to Princeton, by cruise-liner, first-class as always, to a professorship in the Mathematics Department, shared with his fellow Hungarian, mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner.