Besprechung im Zentralblatt:
<blockquote>The article under review is an interview that Albrecht Beutelspacher and Günter Törner led with Günter Pickert shortly before his death. It first appeared in the ”Mitteilungen der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung” and has now been translated into English.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Günter Pickert studied mathematics at Göttingen from 1933-39, his advisor was Helmut Hasse. He then served as a First Lieutenant during the war. A relatively large part of the interview is devoted to his time as a prisoner of war, where he ran a camp university together with other officers. Later he worked at Tübingen and Gieß en, in 1955 he authored an at the time influential textbook on projective planes, and he also was of importance in Germany’s teachers education. The interview follows these lifelines and together with many anecdotes presents Pickerts views and positive or negative opinions about former colleagues and about teaching and learning of mathematics. </blockquote>
<blockquote>The interview presents some parts of the history of mathematics from a nowadays unusual angle and one must say that at least some of the tellings are not in accordance with well-established historical studies. </blockquote>
<blockquote>The history of the Göttingen Institute in the 1930s is by now well-documented, both in the history of science as in popular books like Constance Reid’s ”Hilbert”. A famous anecdote tells Hilbert to have been asked in 1934 by the new Minister Rust whether his institute really suffered ”under the departure of the Jews and their friends” and he is said to have replied: ”There is no longer an institute!”. We do not know if this conversation is supported by historical sources but it is undisputed that the Göttingen institute experienced an unprecedented decline in this period. Even after 1934 there were massive confrontations between Hasse, who (despite supporting nazism) tried to maintain the international network of Göttingen mathematics, and people like Tornier and Teichmüller, who with the support of the students tried to establish a ”German Mathematics”. Well-documented is the boycott of Edmund Landau’s 1933 Analysis lecture by the then freshmen, through which he was prematurely forced into retirement.</blockquote>
<blockquote> It is clear that such developments, not at least the boycott of lectures, must have influenced any of the young students one way or the other. So it certainly comes as a surprise that the interview completely avoids to discuss these events and rather one is between the lines getting an impression of the 1930s as a time when otherwise suppressed parts of mathematics came into blossom. (For example Pickert asserts that ”at that time Hasse was basically concerned with lattice theory - plain lattice theory” though he later ”wasn’t very happy about [the Hasse diagram] named after him”. This assessment is noteworthy, as Hasses research interests of the time are well documented and were mainly about the arithmetic of function fields. One wonders whether with his remaining staff and students he could still discuss the problems that he actually worked about.)</blockquote>
<blockquote>The reviewer found it a bit irritating that while political issues (including the events of war) are entirely taken out of discussion, on the other hand the interview is systematically trying to debunk all those mathematicians which seem not to have been on the (in the view of the authors) right side of the battle, often resorting to stories and rumors that have long been refuted by the history of mathematics. A typical example for this is how the history of the ”Lambacher Schweizer” is presented, a series of mathematics textbooks for high school students that over the last 70 years appeared in several hundred editions by a similar number of authors. The story told in this interview goes in short as follows: Wilhelm Schweizer, who had to leave school for political reasons after 1945, needed Theophil Lambacher, who had kept a clean sheet, to get a printing licence, Lambacher himself then ”did not contribute anything to the schoolbook mentioned above”. There is essentially nothing true to this story: it is not true that Schweizer had to leave school (it seems that the authors confuse Schweizer to Kuno Fladt, who was principal of the same school as Schweizer and who indeed was an active nazi and for this reason had to leave school for several years), it is not true that Lambacher was needed to get the printing license (in fact it were the allied officials who had asked Schweizer to develop new textbooks) and it is not true that Lambacher did not contribute to the new schoolbooks that Lambacher and Schweizer were writing together after the war on the basis of already existing books. (What is true is that from 1959 on Schweizer was the sole editor of the book series. This actually did not mean that he was authoring the books alone but rather that he was managing then dozens of authors.) </blockquote>
<blockquote> One may have wished the authors had checked their stories against the existing sources, which are nowadays easily available e.g. through Wikipedia. And one may also have wished for a more careful translation of the original german interview. Comparing the two versions one sees that a number of sentences (including some negative comments about other mathematicians) got a sharpness after translation that they didn’t have in the untranslated version. In some occasions sentences completely changed their meaning after translation and some parts of the interview actually look like a superficially corrected machine translation, for example when the professional title Förster (german for forester) becomes translated as a name (Mr. Förster).</blockquote>
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