Curated playlist
Academic staff of the University of Göttingen
- Karl BarthKarl Barth mailed the Barmen Declaration to Adolf Hitler. The Swiss theologian wrote nearly all of it.
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize partly for new elements that were really fission products.
- Christian Gottlob HeyneChristian Gottlob Heyne, a poor weaver's son, went on to direct Göttingen's university library.
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann's father asked Theodore von Kármán to talk his son out of mathematics.
- Werner HeisenbergA spy once carried a pistol to a Werner Heisenberg lecture, ready to shoot him. Moe Berg did not fire.
- Carl Friedrich GaussAt nineteen, Carl Friedrich Gauss proved a 17-sided polygon could be drawn with just a compass and straightedge.
- Jacob GrimmJacob Grimm and his brother expected their dictionary to take roughly ten years. It was finished in 1961.
- Edmund HusserlA Franciscan priest smuggled approximately 40,000 pages of Edmund Husserl's notes out of Nazi Germany.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller stood and watched the Trinity test while nearly everyone else lay face-down.
- Paul DiracPaul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted antimatter, and the positron appeared in 1932.
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- Hermann MinkowskiHermann Minkowski saw relativity as four-dimensional, with time and space intermingled.
- Max BornMax Born won his 1954 Nobel Prize for work he finished nearly three decades earlier.
- Emmy NoetherEmmy Noether lectured at Göttingen under a man's name. Her classes were advertised as Hilbert's, with her as assistant.
- Johann Matthias GesnerJohann Sebastian Bach dedicated a canon to his friend, the Latin scholar Johann Matthias Gesner. They met in Weimar.
- Peter DebyeA unit of measurement, a lunar crater and a minor planet all carry Peter Debye's name.
- Walther NernstChemist Walther Nernst also invented an electric piano. He built it in 1930 with Bechstein and Siemens.