Curated playlist
Academic staff of the University of Göttingen
- Karl BarthKarl Barth appeared on the cover of Time magazine on the 20th of April 1962 - a Swiss theologian whose arguments about God had somehow broken out of seminaries and lecture halls and into the mainstream of American religious culture. He was…
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- Christian Gottlob HeyneChristian Gottlob Heyne was born on the 25th of September 1729 in Chemnitz, Saxony, the son of a poor weaver who had fled Silesia to preserve his Protestant faith. That origin story, poverty undercut by principle, tracks almost every…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years. He proved that a regular seventeen-sided polygon, the heptadecagon, could be drawn with nothing…
- Jacob GrimmJacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most wide-ranging scholarly legacy in the history of the German language. His father Philipp,…
- Edmund HusserlEdmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a small town in the Margraviate of Moravia, the second of four children of a Jewish milliner. He would go on to found phenomenology, one of the most far-reaching philosophical…
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark…
- Paul DiracPaul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on the 8th of August 1902 in Bristol, England, and died on the 20th of October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida. In the eighty-two years between those dates, he wrote an equation that predicted the existence…
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee put it there for contributions that had reshaped physics over three decades. Born…
- Hermann MinkowskiHermann Minkowski died of appendicitis on the 12th of January 1909 in Göttingen. He was forty-four years old. The mathematician who had quietly reshaped how physicists think about the universe was gone, and his closest friend, David…
- Max BornMax Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for work he had completed nearly three decades earlier. The delay was not an oversight. It was a slow reckoning with just how much he had changed the way science thought about reality. Born…
- Emmy NoetherIn a joint faculty meeting at the University of Göttingen, one professor protested aloud: "What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?" The mathematician…
- Johann Matthias GesnerJohann Matthias Gesner was born on the 9th of April 1691 in Roth an der Rednitz, a small town near Ansbach in the Principality of Ansbach. By the time he died on the 3rd of August 1761 in Göttingen, he had spent decades reshaping how Latin…
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been attached to a unit of measurement, a lunar crater, a minor planet, and more than a…
- Walther NernstWalther Nernst drove a car with a cylinder of nitrous oxide bolted to it, injected directly into the carburetor for extra power. This was not a stunt. It was the natural behavior of a man who sold a lightbulb patent for one million marks…