Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

various American universities, discussing the possibilities for jobs for refugee mathematicians and physicists. To save one of them, André Weil, von Neumann appealed directly to the French ambassador (representing the collaborationist Vichy government) to the United States. His mission was successful, and Weil ultimately spent many years on the faculty of the IAS. By helping in various ways to facilitate the ingathering of many of the world's finest minds, my father was making his own contribution both to the literal and economic survival of scientific colleagues and to the intellectual treasure that propelled the United States to the forefront of scientific discovery in the second half of the twentieth century.
     
    My parents' social life was anchored in their relationships with my father's colleagues at the institute. These included Einstein, the only other European among the institute's original five professors. In those days Einstein was quite a social being, most unlike the recluse he became after his wife's death in 1936. My mother told of the excursion she took with the Einsteins while my father was out of town, to a concert in Newark, some forty miles from Princeton, when she was very pregnant with me. Apparently Einstein got bored with the music and nudged his wife, saying “Come on, Elsa, let's go.” And leave they did, quite forgetting my mother, who had to take a milk train home. She awoke the next morning to find a large bouquet of roses from Einstein, along with a note of abject apology.
     
    My own earliest memories of Einstein are of a much more reticent personality. By then his wife Elsa was dead and he had pretty much retreated from social encounters. He was visible mainly at a distance during the afternoon teas that took place daily in the institute's Fuld Hall, and his fame rested not only on his brilliance but also on his eccentricity, symbolized by his wild hair and the fact that he didn't wear socks. He had one close friend among his colleagues, Kurt Gödel, with whom he walked daily to and from the institute, deep in conversation as they went.
     
    Gödel, an Austrian who spent long periods at the institute during the 1930s and moved to the United States permanently in 1939, had made his own major contribution to mathematics in his “incompleteness theorems.” In them, he showed that no set of axioms (basic propositions) underlying a mathematical system could provide the basis for proving all the true statements within that system, that an attempt would always be stymied by a paradox of the sort inherent in the statement “I never tell the truth.” He was also a close friend of my father's, even though his incompleteness theorems had demonstrated that von Neumann's own early effort to ground all mathematical statements in a set of fundamental axioms—the subject of his doctoral dissertation—was doomed to fail. Sadly, Gödel, who was subject to bouts of severe depression, became convinced toward the end of his life, long after Einstein and von Neumann were dead, that someone was trying to poison him. He refused to eat and died of starvation.
     
    Despite her rising position in the Princeton social hierarchy whenEinstein left her behind in Newark, my mother was still very young, in her early twenties, and inexperienced in the ways of her newly adopted homeland. It is not surprising, therefore, that when she had doubts about Princeton's small-town hospital as a place in which to deliver her firstborn, she should have turned for advice to the British-born wife of one of her husband's colleagues, Elizabeth Mary Dixon Richardson Veblen. Oswald Veblen, nephew of the famed social critic Thorstein Veblen and one of the leading lights of Princeton's mathematics department before he joined the IAS faculty, was my father's American mentor. He was responsible for Princeton offering my father a one-term per year lectureship in mathematical physics in 1930–32 and, when the IAS was founded, pushed strongly