![]() Its most famous scientist was Albert Einstein, a Jew and 14 of the 38 German Nobel Prize winners between 19 were Jews. ![]() Even more so than the racial laws that Hitler introduced as soon as he came to power in 1933.Īll these arguments are nonsense and go against history, because within the German mathematical tradition, Jews have been fundamental elements this also extends to the artistic, intellectual and cultural tradition in general. As a consequence, Bieberbach concluded that the existence of non-Aryan mathematicians in Germany could end up corrupting Aryan mathematicians, which not only justified but demanded the need for “purification”. According to Bieberbach, although a mathematical result is a mathematical result, although the value of \(\pi\) is the value of \(\pi\), and the Pythagorean theorem the Pythagorean theorem, nationality, race and blood do affect certain approaches, styles, pedagogical attitudes and beliefs about the nature of mathematics and, by affecting all this, end up also affecting the kind of mathematics one or the other produces. Thus, some mathematical concepts ended up being cited as “spirit of our spirit and blood of our blood, pieces of the Nordic soul”, while science was a product dependent on “the ideology, race and blood of its creators”. In the face of Jewish mathematics, Aryan mathematics, “organic”, “concrete”, “completely open to Reality”, “traversed by the stream of experience”, was raised up against Jewish mathematics. According to Bieberbach, these sentences were the proof that came to demonstrate the “mental” contamination that afflicted the non-Aryan mathematics that both Jacobi and Cantor did. As if mental experience were not human! Bieberbach, as an old manīieberbach liked to quote two phrases by the mathematicians Carl Gustav Jacobi (1804-1851), a Jew, and Georg Cantor (1841-1918) – whose mathematics the Nazis branded as Jewish: “In honour of the human spirit”, Jacobi once wrote in answer to the question: “Why do we have to do mathematics? Cantor’s sentence: “The essence of mathematics is freedom” – no doubt a sentence that does not sit well with the Nazi ideology. According to his bizarre mathematical/racial doctrine, there was a “degenerate”, “inorganic”, “alien to reality”, “enemy of life” mathematics it was the mathematics made by Jews – also by Frenchmen – and contaminated by their racial idiosyncrasy: “Jewish thought always begins with something that is already mental and never with something natural or coming from human experience”, he went so far as to say. The main ideologue of mathematical Nazism was Ludwig Bieberbach (1886-1982). ![]() A young Bieberbach sporting a Hitler moustacheĪs the 1930s unfolded, Nazi ideology was carried to its ultimate consequences in Germany, and eventually tainted mathematics as well. What our professor never told us is that, behind the definition he used, there was a sinister story of hatred, evil and crime, one of the most terrible in history: that of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews. It always seemed to me a rather odd definition, far removed from the elegant and luminous one found by the Greeks: \(\pi\) is the ratio – the quotient, we say today – between the area of any circle and that of the square raised above its radius or, as Archimedes showed, the ratio between the length of any circle and its diameter. The professor, addicted to the logical deductive method, had axiomatically introduced us to the trigonometric functions \(\mathrm\,a=1\). In my first year as a mathematics student, one of the teachers defined the number \(\pi\) in a rather fanciful way. (published in El Cultural, supplement of El Mundo on the occasion of Pi Day)
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