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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, this article does not answer the question of why such a concentration of brilliance developed at Göttingen. If we wanted to build a new Göttingen, how would we do it? What factors allowed Göttingen to exist? For most of a century, Germany was leading in most scientific and academic fields, but what allowed this? When we think of the Golden Age of physics we are thinking of a cultural event that had its center in Germany, but why? And why has Germany been so dull and flat ever since? Clearly, building a liberal democracy is not enough to ensure such a cultural event. Much of Germany was liberal but non-democratic during its golden age, as other places were, but what made Germany special at this time?

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this sounds like a good explanation:

> University of Göttingen had more academic freedom than generations past. They were promised intellectual autonomy and freedom from close religious supervision. Instead, they were recruited solely to advance knowledge and carry out original research. The education of students was also more egalitarian than it had been previously in Europe, as both rich and poor were admitted and trained.

After working at several universities, and interacting with lots of institutions on both sides of the pond, I think this freedom issue is also what makes American Academia more successful than European Academia these days.

In Europe, academic freedom is limited because the structure we have resembles a very wide pyramid, with some minor differences across fields and countries. Junior professorships are more rare and more difficult to get into. The result is always the same, a full professor that controls his field locally and lots of expendable badly-paid postdocs working for him. Access to funding is also much more limited, which in turn restricts the capacity of said postdocs to pursue their own ideas, even while working under the umbrella of the professor.

In the US, tenure-track assistant professorships are much more common and requirements to apply are more flexible. Seed grants for junior faculty members are also common and not too hard to obtain. The result is a lot more freedom to explore. Basically, it is the same issue as with technology. EU suffers from over-regulation and control by some rent-seeking elites.

Isn't it much simpler than that?

US research receives 20 percent more funding relative to Europe (2017 data). More funding means more science? On top of that I would guess a post doc in the US can find a nice job at a company way way easier than the same person in Europe for the same reason: there are more higher-tech US companies with more big money who need the smartest people in the world to work for them.

I would also guess more and more loss of buying power (inflation without increase in productivity) in general causes a carreer in academia to become less and less attractive relative to a carreer in the commercial sector. That goes for both Europe and the US I suppose.

Example: I'm in Europe with a bachelors degree working as a freelancer (engineer) and probably make 300 to 500 percent more than people who work their ass off for decades in academia. So yeah there's "curiosity" and "passion" to stay in academia, but there's also cold hard cash.

My experience involves really well funded research areas in e.g. Oxbridge, sometimes better funded than their US counterparts I have interacted with. So I don't think its only about funding, but how funding is allocated. EU funding has a winner-takes-it-all structure. A few groups get enormous grants and the rest get nothing. Ironically, these groups have questionable productivity. Whereas in the US, e.g. NIH has lots of small and mid-sized grants that are suitable for a junior academic.

Junior faculty openings also exhibit the same trend and are much more common in the US. Among all people I have met in EU Academia throughout these years, only one person managed to progress to a faculty position. All others left Academia. Quite brutal, that figure should give policymakers some pause. In contrast, I know a few US academics that moved from PhD student to assistant and associate professor positions.

Exploiting postdocs without any promotion opportunities in sight is so common in EU that many countries are passing, or have already passed, laws to limit postdoc length. However, without more junior faculty openings and permanent staff scientist positions, I am not sure how this is going to work out.

My experience is different. The main advantage of the American Academia is the availability of entry-level faculty positions. Success rates for funding applications are also higher. On the other hand, PhD students and postdocs are less independent from their supervisors than in Europe. They lack the usual protections as employees you would expect in Europe, and it's not as easy for them to get independent funding. Students and postdocs are also paid better than in the US (relative to what they would get outside the academia).

I'm not sure about the status of academic freedom. Administrators, politicians, and donors seem to have more influence in the US, and the entire academia seems to be more politicized.

I agree, that's essentially what I said. Entry-level faculty positions and funding are much more common in the US.

Differences (structure, funding, prestige) between institutes within Europe / USA are way larger than the differences between Europe versus USA.

What really matters in the end is whether an institute is able to attract “rockstars” in their field. Even better if these rockstars care about their institute and are willing to hire and develop young talent.

A single rockstar can elevate the prestige of an entire institution: look at Richard Sutton at University of Alberta, or Thomas Cech at Colorado.

This was my impression also, that there is a lot of difference how academia works across Europe. I'm not really an academic, but I went to a small international machine learning conference some years ago. The Norwegian postdocs got paid better than the French professor, apparently.

A French professor (eg CNRS researcher) is a civil servant, appointed for life, with substantial benefits such as pensions and absolute academic freedom. A postdoc in Norway has salary contingent on grants, limited to a few years, and is at the mercy of an advisor (a bad boss will destroy your career).

Making a few thousand euros more per month as a postdoc in Norway is nothing in comparison with a lifetime appointment at CNRS.

Competition for CNRS positions is as difficult as getting into a top tier faculty position in United States.

> The Norwegian postdocs got paid better than the French professor, apparently.

Norway is a more expensive country to live in than France.

While I'm not discounting your experience, American PhD students are burning out at a very high rate

Funding is probably higher in the US and of course if they drop out getting a job I'd usually easier than in Europe.

> The education of students was also more egalitarian than it had been previously in Europe, as both rich and poor were admitted and trained.

This reminds me of a post I recall, that the lone genius is actually a symbol of society's sweeping failures and not of singular merit.

Nowadays various religion like paradigmas have returned to sabotage scientific progress. Some are obvious,other less so.the biggest though in my opinion are the "academia has to enulate a company" and the progressive paradigm.

Just hand money to individials/groups whos papers changed the world. If they want to buy services from a institution,thats their thing.

It's not clear whether it is desirable to build a new Göttingen. Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of assembling brilliant minds in one place, other than temporarily for conferences and visits.

"Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture" https://www.quantamagazine.org/monumental-proof-settles-geom... is an interesting article that describes the multi-year effort to obtain this important result. The final proof has nine authors affiliated with seven institutions: Denis Gaitsgory, Max Planck Institute; Sam Raskin and Joakim Færgeman, Yale University; Dima Arinkin, University of Wisconsin; Nick Rozenblyum, University of Toronto; Dario Beraldo, University College London; Lin Chen, Tsinghua University; Justin Campbell and Kevin Lin, University of Chicago.

If I remember right Deep Work by Cal Newport talks about Bell Labs and how that came to be such an epicentre of invention back in the day. The author reckons that the architecture of the building had a lot to do with it. It allowed the employees to do uninterrupted, concentrated work when needed but then when exiting their offices the design of the building facilitated lots of chance encounters with other people in other departments which meant a lot of exchanging of ideas and knowledge. You don't get this kind of "hive mind" effect with remote work.

> Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of assembling brilliant minds in one place, other than temporarily for conferences and visits.

Lmao. Only someone who has never been a part of a high performance team with excellent mentors available in person throughout the day, can possibly believe this.

Alternatively, try this sentence: "Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of a married couple living together in one place to raise a family."

I have to agree, high performance teams need to be together in proximity to do world changing stuff (or maybe in AR worlds that are as natural as real worlds in the future). Remote work is for big standard work that doesn’t require too much innovation or if 1 person is capable of carrying the team. Yet to see counter examples to this

Mathematicians aren't having sex or changing diapers, math can all be in LaTeX

The analogy is a bit hyperbolic but not off base at all.

In my field, there is a lot of discussion over whether conferences should go virtual to ensure "equity", "inclusion", and all that; and to save pollution and CO2 from plane travel. According to the defenders of that take, current technology makes meeting in person totally unnecessary and online conferences can replace physical ones just fine. But curiously enough, everyone who I've seen defend that position are at elite universities in places like California where they have a high concentration of top figures in the field within a short drive. Almost no one from more remote areas (like myself) defends that... largely because many of us have stories where those polluting plane tickets helped us connect with relevant people in the field, learn and boost our career.

But back to the marriage analogy... when those people from top universities make that comment, I usually tell them that if they are so interested in equity, diversity, not polluting and all that jazz, and since according to them online interaction is enough and getting together physically is just a luxury, they should then take remote PhD students (which would even let them select from a larger pool!). It's an obvious conclusion of their position, right?

The answer is always crickets.

There's truth in both. For countries with little research funding (Eastern Europe in my case), travelling to top conferences is often prohibitively expensive. Top AI conferences are regularly in places like Hawaii. This excludes many regions and those researchers must submit to lower tier conferences, or - as already commonly happens - they have to move to a richer country and do research there.

Remote conferences and lower publishing fees definitely help people at these underfunded places. But it is true that being there in person is still much more valuable. Informal face to face interaction at posters, joint dinners between different research groups, mingling during coffee breaks etc. are not replaceable by a Zoom Q&A.

\LaTeX prevents conception of new ideas. You really need to rawdog it on a black or whiteboard to see that.

Now this is the part I take issue with

Most likely their discussion were over zoom while scribbling over a blackboard.

I remember having an instant messanger 20years ago which would render LaTeX equations on the fly. The only one that can do it today is Emacs.

> Mathematicians aren't having sex or changing diapers, math can all be in LaTeX

Sex and LaTex! I dig it!

There were plenty of accomplished mathematicians before Hilbert. But the real golden age of Göttingen math and physics was due to a large recruitment effort led by David Hilbert. After realizing some early success in his recruitment effort, the reputation of Göttingen as the place to be for math and physics grew more organically.

I read a bunch of Hilbert's letters once, thinking it would be an interesting window into a significant mind. It was 90% departmental politics - not really the cynical kind: he was really concerned with getting good mathematicians jobs (in Göttingen or elsewhere). And you get to watch him observe all his efforts come to naught as the German political situation goes nuts building up to the Second World War, and employment restrictions are added, people flee, etc. .

It shows you how valuable it is to have these superstars in your institute. Hiring One hilbert is worth more than hiring a thousand median scientists, and way cheaper too!

> This reminds me of a post I recall, that the lone genius is actually a symbol of society's sweeping failures and not of singular merit.

(from a comment above) Idk much about math or anything would love to make it to AGI that can tell me which opinion is correct when reading HN

That is just partially true. Hilbert was essential but "just" one factor amongst others.

For example, there was also Felix Klein (who brought Hilbert to Göttingen) who was more on the teaching side. He even designed the house from the ground up in a way that he thought would be optimal for teaching and working together.

There is a really good article by Norbert Schappacher called

"Das Mathematische Institut der Universität Göttingen im Nationalsozialismus"

"The Mathematical Institute of the University of Göttingen under National Socialism"

https://irma.math.unistra.fr/~schappa/NSch/Publications_file...

You can DeepL it. Here is just the first paragraph:

   Göttingen has been a name in the mathematical world since Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). However, from the end of the 19th century until the National Socialists seized power, it was for many the center of the mathematical world, and in this respect it outstripped the traditional centers of interest: Paris and Berlin was above all the joint work of David Hilbert (1862–1943) and Felix Klein (1849–1925), around whom an increasingly important mathematical institute was formed. Hilbert's role was on the side of creative mathematical research, which he pursued with complete openness to all possible new ideas and with a versatility not seen since Gauss. Felix Klein, on the other hand, was above all an exceptionally successful organizer and academic teacher in Göttingen – four years before his appointment to Göttingen, a health breakdown had ended the period of his most original mathematical research.

It goes into great detail from the pre-war to the post-war era.

In addition, mathematics and physics were very much intertwined in those days - one inspired the other. And Göttingen was essentially a village - everyone knew everyone. They would meet up in a bar in the evening and speak about whats on their mind. That way, there was also a regular get-together with the local industry.

For example Robert Wichard Pohl, head of the 1st physics institute (called "a patriarch of physics" or "The good Lord"), Gustav Tammann, head of the institute for physical chemistry, and the heads of Ruhstrat (a local company specialized in developing and manufacturing high-temperature industrial furnaces, transformers, etc.) regularly met. Pohl wanted to have a furnace for what was later called the Czochralski method (creating pure crystals) and Ruhstrat built the stuff.

Or in 1894, in collaboration with Nobel Prize winner Prof. Walter Nernst, Ruhstrat created the adjustable sliding resistor, the basis for adjusting and changing resistances as well as current and voltage. They supplied the first private homes and businesses in Göttingen with electricity using electrical block stations and developed the electricity meter.

Lots of aspects came together to thrive, not just Hilbert.

P.S. Fun fact: Ernst (or Adolf?) Ruhstrat had the first car in town and later sold it to Tammann.

I think you're mixing the question of what creates great mathematics department and what makes a region generally interesting (plus the article actually answers all those questions well as other commenters note).

Germany has many great mathematicians at present. Just by expanding population and budgets, it probably has more great mathematicians than in the Göttingen days. These mathematicians are not as famous as the Göttingeners of the 1920s, however, fundamentally because earlier mathematicians laid the foundation of the field and later researchers basically have built on those foundations and can't claim the same glory.

As to post-war Germany being boring - I'd assume but it seem neither here nor there.

You are assuming a causal relation direct link between underlying factors and outcomes. It may well be that if Gottingen didn't exist some other place would have been the epicenter of a scientific revolution that was ripe to happen. One would then try to figure out what made that place special.

But if some other place had been the epicenter of a scientific revolution would Gottingen have prevented that? Wouldn't we have just seen people in two different areas discovering things independently? We could ask, why only Gottingen?

>Wouldn't we have just seen people in two different areas discovering things

We did. Göttingen was an important place, but not the epicenter of math. Mathematicians were working all over the globe from China to India, Russia to Britain, America and Germany. Just to mention one of the maybe most gifted people of that period in the world, Srinivasa Ramanujan, people are literally still going through his work and finding novel things.

It's just that we're much better story tellers when it comes to some regions of the world. If you went by movies and biographies you'd think Alan Turing did half of all computer science, who remembers Konrad Zuse? That's one area where Germany routinely gets snubbed in the public imagination.

Göttingen is still a top 200 university, and as far as I remember a talk by Jens Frahm has the highest density of living Nobel Laureates. After the war a famous French singer made a song about Göttingen https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s9b6E4MnCWk And I think she sings of a left leaning free spirit that bloomed again after the war very soon. Academic lifestyle and a focus on the strife for knowledge are still substantial cultural and economic pillars of Göttingen.

Indeed. Hans-Gunther Klein, the then director of the Junges Theater Göttingen, had seen the famous French chansonnière Barbara at a concert in early 1964 and invited her to perform in Göttingen. Due to her life story and her own escape from the Nazis, she initially declined the invitation, but then reluctantly accepted it the following day. She demanded that a grand piano be provided for her performance. When she arrived at the theater on July 4, 1964, however, she found a baby grand piano on the stage. Barbara was extremely annoyed and categorically refused to give the concert. It seemed impossible to fulfill her request, although Hans-Gunther Klein tried everything. In the end, however, a grand piano was procured, which an old lady had made available and which ten students carried through the city. Despite the artist's initial displeasure and the two-hour delay before the concert began, Barbara was enthusiastically celebrated by the audience, which greatly impressed her.

Due to the great success of her first appearance and the unexpectedly warm atmosphere in the city, she extended her engagement by a week. On the afternoon before her last concert, she summarized the impressions she had gathered over the past few days, which had been unexpectedly positive, in the rough version of the chanson Göttingen, which she wrote in the garden of the Junges Theater, and performed it (not yet fully formulated and with a different melody) that same evening. The success of the chanson was sudden and overwhelming. She then returned to Paris, where she completed the lyrics and composition.

The Junges Theater at that time was housed in the house of the current Lumiere cinema.

I was thinking the divide in teutonic culture is not north and south but diagonal. Too far east and too far south they get trigger happy, Schwabians just optimally arrogant, Hamburgers are too nice..

Draw a line that passes thru Ulm & Goettingen, wide enough to contain also ___

TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_sanction

I'll venture a couple guesses.

1) Humboldt's university reforms creating graduate education and research universities. This doesn't explain the seed of German intellectual activity as it was a relatively late development, but it does explain the institutionalization of German intellectual activity. As to the seed...

2) German was the language with the most literate speakers in Europe during the Enlightenment. For a few centuries after the Reformation, Protestant regions did have higher rates of literacy than Catholic or Orthodox regions, and Germans were the most numerous of the Protestant cultural-linguistic groups.

Sources?

For the “For a few centuries after the Reformation, Protestant regions did have higher rates of literacy than Catholic or Orthodox regions” claim, the map in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_Age_of_Enligh... supports that claim. It mentions ten countries. The four most literate were largely Protestant, the six least literate largely Catholic.

The map in the link is strange. Shows 21st century countries while it pertains to times a few hundred years ago. This doesn't convey the trust.

It is actually also seeming to be asking the wrong question. Not why Göttingen, but why Germany. The universe may have been a natural attractor like big universities everywhere, but if the country surrounding it were impoverished mentally, it would not have much to attract.

One answer given at the time by Heinrich Heine was that Germany didn’t have the revolution that put the new bourgeois class in power (like in France). Therefore censorship, political repression and the dead end of many „German“ micro states meant that philosophy and other disciplines where a way to work on the topics of the new age without getting in conflict with the extraordinary dimension of political backwardness. You could say England is the proof that it does not have to be that way, but they where pioneering capitalist economy, so that’s another case. Heinrich Heine hated Göttingen btw.

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