Hilbert's 1900 problem list steered a century of mathematics
In 1900 David Hilbert presented a set of unsolved problems that shaped what mathematicians worked on for the next hundred years. He turned Gottingen into the world's leading mathematics centre, then lived to watch the Nazis gut it. Asked if the institute had suffered, he said it no longer existed.
Hilbert was born on 23 January 1862 in Prussia, either in Konigsberg, as he claimed, or in nearby Wehlau. His father was a judge who drilled Prussian virtues into him, his mother loved philosophy, astronomy and prime numbers. He started school two years late, disliked the gymnasium Kant had attended, and switched to a more scientific one. At the University of Konigsberg he formed a lifelong bond with Hermann Minkowski, whom he called his best and truest friend, and the two learned intensely from the young professor Adolf Hurwitz. He took his doctorate in 1885 under Ferdinand von Lindemann.
In 1895 Felix Klein brought him to Gottingen, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His range was enormous: invariant theory, algebraic number theory, the foundations of geometry, operator theory, mathematical physics and, with his students, proof theory and mathematical logic. He backed Georg Cantor's controversial set theory. Among his 69 doctoral students were Hermann Weyl and Richard Courant, John von Neumann served as his assistant, and chess champion Emanuel Lasker studied under him. He edited the leading journal Mathematische Annalen from 1902 to 1939.
His private life was harder. He married Kathe Jerosch in 1892; their only child, Franz, suffered mental illness, and when Franz entered a clinic Hilbert declared he would regard himself as having no son, grieving his wife deeply. Raised a Calvinist, he became agnostic and argued that mathematical truth needs no God. Around 1925 pernicious anaemia left him exhausted, and his assistant Eugene Wigner judged he did little science afterwards.
In 1933 the Nazis drove out Weyl, who held Hilbert's old chair, along with Emmy Noether, Edmund Landau and his logic collaborator Paul Bernays. At a banquet, education minister Bernhard Rust asked whether the institute had truly suffered from losing its Jews, prompting Hilbert's bitter reply. He died in 1943; fewer than a dozen people attended his funeral, and the wider world learned of his death months later.
Source: David Hilbert
