Transcending Tradition: A Bridge from Germany to America

Accompanying the international exhibition Transcending Tradition: Jewish Mathematicians in German-Speaking Academic Culture, this associated exhibit highlights the University of Chicago’s holdings relating to Jewish mathematicians who fled to America, their friends, and those influenced by them.

University of Chicago professor and Nobel Prize winning physicist James Franck was close friends with many of the mathematicians highlighted in Transcending Tradition; his Physics Institute at Göttingen University in Germany was next to the Göttingen’s famous Mathematics Institute.  Pictures and letters from the collection of James Franck present an intimate and personal view of the social and professional lives of these scientists and mathematicians. We see them at work and at play; they respond to disturbing political events as they unfold. The papers of Emil Gumbel depict the life of a man who was one of the Nazis’ most hated intellectuals; his papers demonstrate the difficulties of a life in exile.

Finally, the exhibit connects the intellectual world of the University of Chicago to the German academic world. It examines the figure of Saunders Mac Lane, the public intellectual and head of the University of Chicago mathematics department who received his doctorate from Göttingen in the 1930s. It presents a look at a short-lived University of Chicago exchange program with the University of Frankfurt which was designed to contribute to the re-education of Germans and to the maintenance of world peace.

Curated by graduate student Miriam Bilsker, this exhibit is on display in the Atrium of the John Crerar Library, 5730 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago, from October 4 to December 18, 2012.  It is free and open to the public. Hours are Mondays through Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.