Einstein’s Tutor: errata
I’m collecting here corrections of mistakes as I become aware of them as well as notes about things I believe I could have made clearer or more complete in the book. Please let me know in comments or email if you have your own thoughts, and especially if you think you’ve found a mistake.
p. 82: Things culminated in November 1915 (not 2015). Even with an editor and at least two others (besides me) combing though the book, these things slip by.
p. 173: The incident with the Brownshirt arriving for Emmy Noether’s clandestine class merited another footnote. The Nazi student was probably Ernst Witt (see footnote 1 of the Letter by Norbert Schappacher and Erhard Scholz in The Mathematical Intelligencer, 18, 1996, p. 5, DOI 10.1007/BF03024810, which also identifies the class as a “seminar on Hasse’s notes on Class Field Theory”, and footnote 68 on p. 60 of Mathematicians under the Nazis by Sanford L. Segal (2014), ISBN 0691164630).
p. 272: My recounting of a semi-famous incident in which I described Paul Gordan rejecting a paper submission by Hilbert, with a crack about “theology”, deserves some amplification. In fact, Klein was the editor in charge of the journal in question at the time, and Gordan’s anti-recommendation was in a report submitted by him to the editor. But Klein corresponded with Hilbert about this, and the upshot was that he decided to accept the paper (a good decision, as it turned out). The complaint attributed in math history lore to Gordan, that Hilbert’s proof was not mathematics but theology, is something that he may have said, but this is not certain: we first hear of it in Max Noether’s eulogy for Gordan, over 20 years after the incident in question, and there is no independent corroboration. For more about this, see “Hilbert on Theology and Its Discontents: The Origin Myth of Modern Mathematics” by Colin McLarty, published in a conference proceedings and “‘Jewish Mathematics’ at Göttingen in the Era of Felix Klein” by David E. Rowe, Isis 77, pp. 422-449.
p. 300: The index entry for Bernhard Rust mispells his first name.
