Mastodawn

Hilbert, by Constance Reid.

A great book, showing David Hilbert's passage from a bold young and ambitious mathematician to an old man surrounded by the ruin of the mathematics department in Göttingen in the 1930s. This helped me place a lot of names of contemporaries, and I can appreciate Minkowski's truncated career much better, I had no idea how big a deal he was in this whole circle, nor that he died early. The author treats the mathematics very well even though she's not trained in it, and from a modern standpoint it helps me connects back from post-1930s work to the previous generation's revolutionary developments.

Electronic version: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0739-9

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John Carlos Baez Apr 8

@highergeometer - I may have read this once; I should read it again!

Minkowski was more than Einstein's teacher - the guy who realized time is imaginary - but I don't know his whole institutional role.

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theHigherGeometer Apr 8

@johncarlosbaez He worked on both the geometry of numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometry_of_numbers as well as mathematical physics later in his life. When he was just 18 he won (jointly, due to his youth) a big prize from the French Academy of Sciences. Was a close friend of Hilbert and was in the Göttingen mathematics department after Zurich, which was a position taken out of necessity to have a job. Also, Carathéodory was his student, also a later Göttingen member.

Geometry of numbers - Wikipedia

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Pozorvlak

@highergeometer @johncarlosbaez the story behind the prize is a bit more complicated than that, IIRC - the challenge was set specifically to force an elderly Henry Smith (of Smith Normal Form fame) to write up a result he'd announced decades earlier but never fully dotted the i's on. Writing up the proof took a great strain on Smith, who died before the prize was awarded. The fact that there were any other submissions came as a great surprise to the Academy, and there were accusations that Minkowski must have cheated somehow, but I think the final conclusion was that he wasn't even aware of Smith's work on the problem.