Göttingen

Göttingen, Deutschland,¹ is located on the Leine River, a tributary of the Aller, in turn a tributary of the Weser. The city has over 120 thousand residents². Its tallest building is the St.-Jacobi Kirche (72 meters).³

The university at Göttingen underwent a curious transformation. From being a center of racist Altertumswissenschaft (Antiquity Science), anticipating Alexander Humboldt's early 19th century national reforms that denigrated the polytechniques and mathematics,⁴ the school became the world's center for theoretical mathematicians. Carl Friedrich Gauss did a construction of the regular 17-con while there, and later, on his return, presided over students Didekind and Riemann. Bernhard Riemann, challenged by Gauss, delivered his Über die Hypothesen, welche dre Geometrie zu Grunde liegen lecture. Richard Didekind took his great inspiration from Riemann back to their native Braunswieg (Brunswick). David Hilbert moved to Göttingen in 1920 and pushed his Hilbert's program on the mathematical foundations of proofs to their logical limits, and remained there when Jewish mathematicians fled. Among those were Emmy Noether, appointed there with Hilbert's support, whose ideas reached a wider audience through a book of her student, B. L. van der Waerden.⁵

External references

Gäseliesel Fountain in Göttingen

Footnotes

1. Germany in English.
2. 2010 calculation in world-gazetteer.com, accessed 2/16/2011.
3. Emporis.com, accessed 2/17/2011.
4. Martin Bernal, Black Athena, V. I (Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 215 - 233 and 286.
5. John Stillwell, Mathematics and its History, 2nd Ed. (Springer, 2002).