Göttingen was the world's mathematics capital until the Nazi purge emptied it
By 1900 David Hilbert and Felix Klein had drawn mathematicians from around the world to Göttingen. Then came the purge of 1933. When the Nazi education minister reportedly asked Hilbert in 1934 how mathematics was faring now that Jewish influence was gone, Hilbert answered that there was no mathematics left in Göttingen.
George II, as ruler of Hanover, ordered the privy councillor Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen to found a university in 1734 to spread Enlightenment ideals; students arrived from 1737. It started humbly with a riding hall and fencing house, lectures in a church, a monastery or professors' homes. Napoleon later called it the university of Europe, belonging to no state. By 1812 its library held over 200,000 volumes, and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg had held one of Germany's first chairs in experimental physics from 1769.
For a time it was mainly a law school, with law students often outnumbering everyone else combined by its centenary in 1837. Metternich and Wilhelm von Humboldt studied public law there, Heinrich Heine took a law doctorate in 1825, and Otto von Bismarck arrived in 1833, living in a tiny cottage on the old town wall supposedly because his rowdiness had got him banned from lodging inside the walls. In 1837 King Ernest Augustus of Hanover expelled seven professors, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and physicist Wilhelm Weber among them, for protesting his revocation of the liberal constitution.
Mathematics ran in a line from Carl Friedrich Gauss through Dirichlet and Riemann to Hilbert and Klein. Ludwig Prandtl, arriving in 1904, pioneered the boundary layer concept and mathematical aerodynamics. From 1921 to 1933 Max Born led the physics theory group and co-discovered quantum mechanics; J. Robert Oppenheimer earned his doctorate under him. Americans prized a Göttingen education: George Bancroft took a PhD there in 1820.
The 1933 purge drove out Born, James Franck, Emmy Noether, Richard Courant, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, most of them to Britain, Canada or the United States. In 1945 Göttingen became the first university in the western zones to reopen, under British control. Later students included Jürgen Habermas and Ursula von der Leyen. By its own count, 47 Nobel laureates have ties to it.
Source: University of Göttingen
