Current site:
- Mathematics
- Historical facts
- Anecdotes
David Hilbert lived and worked in Göttingen for 48 years, until his death in 1943. The first years must not have been easy, because his direct and independent East Prussian personality and unassimilated dialect soon came into conflict with the then very pronounced class prejudices in university circles. It was, for example, felt to be a scandal that the full professor would play billiards with his assistants in a public place.
But Hilbert got over the initial difficulties very well and became widely loved and admired by his students. He himself enjoyed the contact with students as well, and would take long walks with them, discussing mathematics but also politics and economics. His wife Käthe, meanwhile, prepared large meals for the students .
In his book The Luxury of Conscience, Max Born wrote about Hilbert:
He was an original, in science and in life. In conversation he loved the exaggerated punchline. Apparently harmless remarks often carried a polished sharpness or even malice. Constantly thinking about a mathematical problem, Hilbert developed the typical traits of the absent-minded professor. Born recalls:
Before an evening gathering, Mrs. Hilbert says: "But David, your tie is dreadful. Go put on another one." Hilbert disappears; the guests come. When he does not appear after a while, Mrs. Hilbert becomes restless and goes upstairs. She finds him in a nightgown and about to get into bed. He had absent-mindedly continued taking off his shirt and tie, as he was used to doing every day as he went to sleep. His thoughts were off somewhere in mathematical areas.
As people talked at a gathering about astrology and the occult, and some ladies explained that they believed firmly in the art of reading the future in the stars, Hilbert replied, when asked what he thought of these things, that if one brought together the ten most intelligent people in the world to settle on the dumbest thing humans have ever thought up, astrology would not be their answer.
He hated everything dark and irrational. And yet he was apparently always an optimist. When he was made an honorary citizen of Königsberg in 1930, his acceptance speech was recorded on a record. His faith in mathematics and science and in the future of the people concerned with them was summarized in the concluding words: We must know. We will know.
For relaxation David Hilbert loved to work in the garden of his house in the legendary eastern neighborhood of Göttingen. He had set up a large board where he wrote down mathematical formulas that shot through his mind while he was trimming roses or digging up beets. There too, the students would come in to have discussions with him.
Harald Bohr (1887-1951), an important Danish mathematician and brother of the famous physicist Niels Bohr, studied mathematics in Göttingen starting in 1909. On his 60th birthday he gave a lecture in Copenhagen with the title "Look Back." There he said:
I would like to dwell in some more detail on my old memories of Göttingen, which have become particularly dear to me. I returned there often in later years and felt as if it was almost a second home for me. The atmosphere of the small university town of those days is difficult to describe.
Since Gauss's time so many of the greatest mathematicians of the last century - men such as Riemann and Dirichlet - have lived and worked here. Although Göttingen was in many respects a provincial town, calm and peaceful, the richest scientific life blossomed here. A spirit of real international brotherhood of rare intensity prevailed here among the many young mathematicians, who came from almost all over the world to make a pilgrimage to Göttingen, joined by common interest and love for their science.
Similarly, an elite of young mathematicians came to this singular place of learning from different parts of Germany. In my time there were many who would later make most important contributions to our science, men such as Weyl, Hecke, Toeplitz and Courant, just to name a few of the most outstanding among them. The older ones took care of us with touching attention.
Göttingen was at that time also an international center for other sciences than mathematics, but the mathematicians formed the great majority among the young scientists because of the especially great tradition in mathematics there, and it seemed to us, at any rate, as if the city was populated completely by mathematicians.
Many anecdotes were told about this, for example this one about Minkowski: Once as he was walking down the street, he saw a young man unknown to him, who was sunk deep in thought with a tormented expression on his face. Minkowski went to him, gave him a small pat on the back and said encouragingly: "It will surely converge." And - so the story goes - he was completely right, the unknown young man was a mathematician pondering over a problem.