{"id":5264,"date":"2013-03-03T13:02:40","date_gmt":"2013-03-03T13:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=5264"},"modified":"2024-04-30T12:36:16","modified_gmt":"2024-04-30T12:36:16","slug":"our-impact-on-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/our-impact-on-others\/","title":{"rendered":"Our impact on others"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/JOHN-Fritz-1953.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-5265\" alt=\"JOHN-Fritz 1953\" src=\"https:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/JOHN-Fritz-1953-300x199.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nA nice story about the possibly unknown effects of our actions, from a review by mathematician Marjorie Senechal of a book about German Jewish mathematicians:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Fritz John (1910\u20131994) [pictured in 1953], Jewish on his father\u2019s side, left Germany in 1933 for England; in 1935 he was appointed assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.\u00a0 Back in the 1930s, the University of Kentucky was small and isolated but, except for two years of war-related work, John stayed there until 1946, when he moved permanently to New York University.\u00a0 Surely he was glad to rejoin his mentor, [mathematician Richard] Courant.\u00a0 But he made a difference in Lexington; I don\u2019t know if he ever knew it.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>I grew up near Lexington and took piano lessons from a teacher in town named Helen Lipscomb.\u00a0 Helen was a polio victim, confined to a wheelchair; her brother, Bill, was a chemist at the University of Minnesota.\u00a0 I met Bill Lipscomb for the first time in 2009, two years before he died at the age of ninety-two.\u00a0 By then he\u2019d taught at Harvard for forty years and earned a Nobel prize (1976) [in Chemistry] for his work on boranes.\u00a0 Unlike me, Bill had attended the University of Kentucky after a Lexington public high school; he\u2019d had a music scholarship and studied chemistry on the side.\u00a0 \u201c<em>Why did you decide to become a chemist instead of a musician?<\/em>\u201d I asked him. \u201c<em>What changed your mind?<\/em>\u201d \u201c<em>A math class<\/em>,\u201d he told me. \u201c<em>A math class taught by a German named Fritz John.<\/em>\u201d (page 213)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong><em>Reference:<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nMarjorie Senechal [2013]:\u00a0\u00a0 Review of:\u00a0\u00a0 Birgit Bergmann, Moritz Epple, and Ruti Ungar (Editors):\u00a0 <em>Transcending Tradition: Jewish Mathematicians in German-Speaking Academic Culture.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 Springer Verlag, 2012.\u00a0 <em>Notices of the American Mathematical Society<\/em>, <strong>60 (2):\u00a0<\/strong> 209-213.\u00a0 Available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ams.org\/notices\/201302\/rnoti-p209.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A nice story about the possibly unknown effects of our actions, from a review by mathematician Marjorie Senechal of a book about German Jewish mathematicians: Fritz John (1910\u20131994) [pictured in 1953], Jewish on his father\u2019s side, left Germany in 1933 for England; in 1935 he was appointed assistant professor of mathematics at the University of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-matherati","p1","y2013","m03","d03","h13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12531,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5264\/revisions\/12531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}