Princeton ...

Princeton in 1948 was to mathematicians what Paris once was to painters and novelists, Vienna to psychoanalysts and architects, and ancient Athens to philosophers and playwrights. Harald Bohr, brother of Niels Bohr, the physicist, had declared it ”the mathematical center of the universe” in 1936. When the deans of mathematics held their first world-wide meeting after World War II, it was in Princeton.

Fine Hall housed the world’s most competitive, up-to-the-minute mathematics department. Next door -connected, in fact - was the nation’s leading physics department, whose members, including Eugene Wigner, had driven off to Illinois, California, and New Mexico during the war, lugging bits of laboratory equipment, to help build the atomic bomb. A mile or so away, on what had been Olden Farm, was the 118 Institute for Advanced Study, the modern equivalent of Plato’s Academy, where Einstein, Gödel, Oppenheimer, and von Neumann scribbled on their blackboards and held their learned discourses.

Visitors and students from the four corners of the world streamed to this polyglot mathematical oasis, fifty miles south of New York. What was proposed in a Princeton seminar one week was sure to be debated in Paris and Berkeley the week after, and in Moscow and Tokyo the week after that. ”It is difficult to learn anything about America in Princeton”, wrote Einstein’s assistant Leopold Infeld in his memoirs, “much more so than to learn about England in Cambridge”.

In Fine Hall English is spoken with so many different accent s that the resultant mixture is termed Fine Hall English.... The air is full of mathematical ideas and formulae. You have only to stretch out your hand, close it quickly and you feel that you have caught mathematical air and that a few 51 formulae are stuck to your palm.

If one wants to see a famous mathematician one does not need to go to him; it is enough to sit quietly in Princeton, and sooner or later he must come to Fine Hall.

- From “A Beautiful Mind”, the (e)book.