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Herr Doktor Morgan?
May. 12th, 2006 04:46 pmI'm currently reading H. W. Brands' The Reckless Decade, about the 1890s in the US, and just ran across the following interesting item, concerning financial magnate J. Pierpont Morgan:
I would love to know just who the mathematics professor in question was.
That also suggests a possible what-if. It may well be that Morgan, being who he was, could not have chosen differently; but what if he had? That raises questions in two directions. On the one hand: who, if anyone, takes his place in USAn finance, and how does this affect the dynamic of the three-cornered rivalry between Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie? Given Morgan's critical role in rescuing the US government during the Panic of 1893, this is not a trivial question. On the other hand, less important in the global scheme of things but of interest to me: what kind of a mathematical career would Morgan have had? With his driving personality, he could have done for Göttingen what Hilbert was to do a generation later, making it a veritable factory of mathematics; or he might have returned to the US and played a comparable role here. The US was just starting to come into its own mathematically; J. Willard Gibbs (OTL the first great USAn mathematician) began his professorial career in 1871, and J. J. Sylvester came over from Britain in 1876 to help found the American Journal of Mathematics and generally get things organized. What might Professor Morgan have done with such materials?
... Pierpont went to Switzerland to continue his studies. Afterward he travelled north to Germany, where he enrolled in the University of Göttingen. He showed himself to be an exceedingly apt pupil; his mathematics professor tried to talk him into staying on as his assistant. Morgan thanked the professor for the thought but said he had business to attend to.Göttingen, at the time, was the pre-eminent center of mathematics in the world; Carl Friedrich Gauss had seen to that. Morgan graduated in 1857; Gauss had died two years earlier, but Bernhard Riemann had stepped into his shoes. (David Hilbert, who is the third in that sequence, wasn't born until 1862.)
I would love to know just who the mathematics professor in question was.
That also suggests a possible what-if. It may well be that Morgan, being who he was, could not have chosen differently; but what if he had? That raises questions in two directions. On the one hand: who, if anyone, takes his place in USAn finance, and how does this affect the dynamic of the three-cornered rivalry between Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie? Given Morgan's critical role in rescuing the US government during the Panic of 1893, this is not a trivial question. On the other hand, less important in the global scheme of things but of interest to me: what kind of a mathematical career would Morgan have had? With his driving personality, he could have done for Göttingen what Hilbert was to do a generation later, making it a veritable factory of mathematics; or he might have returned to the US and played a comparable role here. The US was just starting to come into its own mathematically; J. Willard Gibbs (OTL the first great USAn mathematician) began his professorial career in 1871, and J. J. Sylvester came over from Britain in 1876 to help found the American Journal of Mathematics and generally get things organized. What might Professor Morgan have done with such materials?
