13 giugno 2021

"This is a very limited field"

An informal letter containing a shortlist of people considered suitable for an IAS job offer (March 1945). It is impressive to read somehow harsh judgments about first-class scientists. For instance, Gödel is said to be "extraordinary in the particular field of mathematical logic; but this is a very limited field". At any rate, the three mathematicians cited in the document were all eventually hired at Princeton (Gödel and Artin in 1946, Weil in 1958).
Wolfgang Pauli, used as a touchstone of Theoretical Physics, was a member of the Institute since 1935 and won the Nobel Prize precisely in 1945.


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