Read on Twitter
This is terrible, and I fear is one story among increasingly many.
Time for one of my esoteric rants, I see
An uncomfortable fact about modern American academia is that we owe much of its renown+prowess to immigrants, especially Jewish academics who fled Europe in the 1930s. https://twitter.com/umairagri/status/1278199652504961025
Time for one of my esoteric rants, I see
An uncomfortable fact about modern American academia is that we owe much of its renown+prowess to immigrants, especially Jewish academics who fled Europe in the 1930s. https://twitter.com/umairagri/status/1278199652504961025
Have you ever heard of the University of Göttingen? No?
Well, you should have. Anybody who was anybody in math and physics up til ~1930s was somehow affiliated with the university. Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert, Klein, Dirichlet, Teller, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, and my fav--Noether
Well, you should have. Anybody who was anybody in math and physics up til ~1930s was somehow affiliated with the university. Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert, Klein, Dirichlet, Teller, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, and my fav--Noether
...Born, von Neumann, Fermi, the list goes on. And those are just the names most closely affiliated--other names who either passed through for a semester or guest lectures include Gödel, Gauss, and Einstein.
This was a _powerhouse_ of a world-class university. [1]
This was a _powerhouse_ of a world-class university. [1]
Then Hitler began his ethnic cleansing bullshit [2] and many renowned European academics (not just in math and physics! those are just the areas I'm personally read on) fled to other countries, but the US (and UK) got an overwhelming proportion. (See [3] for physics example.)
The impact of this immigration is often gravely overlooked and underestimated. For example, "U.S. patents increased by 31 percent after 1933 in fields common among those who emigrated from Germany". [4]
The year 1933 is significant because that's the year when, just two months after Hitler rose to power, a law was put into effect removing Jewish (and other "non-Aryan") academics from various civil service roles, including faculty positions at universities. [2]
And the fucked up thing is--we're beginning to do the same thing here in the US. Our government is making it harder for people it deems somehow less than, to remain in their existing professions by way of deliberately-calibrated immigration bureaucracy.
There's no distinction between what's happening in the US right now and in Germany in the 1930s other than we've traded the language. Instead of "non-Aryans", our government is dehumanizing and disenfranchising anyone "not from here" (pretty rich for a country of immigrants)
There's a lot of very real human suffering that's going to be caused by this displacement. I don't mean to gloss over that by yelling about this other travesty, too. But you MUST understand America's standing as a leader in academia generally, science, technology, will evaporate.
If you don't believe me, well, I'm about to put a ton of reading material at the end of this thread. Go read for yourself.
The last thing I want to leave you with is this chilling quote (from [5]):
"Following the great purge, in 1934 David Hilbert, by then a symbol of--
The last thing I want to leave you with is this chilling quote (from [5]):
"Following the great purge, in 1934 David Hilbert, by then a symbol of--
--German mathematics, was dining with Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister of education.
Rust asked, 'How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?'
Hilbert replied, 'There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.'"
Rust asked, 'How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?'
Hilbert replied, 'There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.'"
[1] "The Poincaré Conjecture", by Donal O'Shea, remains my fav popular math/sci book of all time. The math portions are great, however the part of the book that haunts me years later is the inside look into what happened to German academia under Hitler.
https://www.powells.com/book/-9780802716545
https://www.powells.com/book/-9780802716545
