The popular articles he wrote in one of the Warsaw newspapers were well written but, it seemed to me, not always mathematically exact. At the time my sights were set very high and I expected even newspaper articles about science to be comparable to Poincaré's wonderful writings on popular science or Eddington's explanations of relativity theory for popular audiences.
Infeld came to Princeton later, a few weeks after I did, and collaborated with Einstein on the well-known Einstein-Infeld book on physics, which became a best seller. He had met Einstein in Berlin, and in his autobiography he describes how impressed he had been by his friendliness and ability to put people at ease. In Princeton I hardly saw him; he was not part of the von Neumann crowd.
The Cambridge architecture, the medieval buildings, the beautiful courtyards, the walks I took through the town, some with L. C. Young (now a professor at the University of Wisconsin), are still among the strongest visual impressions of my life. Like my walks through the Paris of the French Revolution, these have somehow influenced my tastes, associations, readings, and studies to this day.
Early in 1935, I returned from Cambridge to Poland. It was now time to think seriously about a university career, although those were, difficult times in which to find even a modest "docent" position. A series of accidental letters was to change this; in one of them, luckily for me, I received an invitation to visit the United States.
Part II: A Working Mathematician in America
Chapter 4. Princeton Days
I first heard about John von Neumann from my high school teacher Zawirski. Kuratowski also described von Neumann's results and his personality. He told me how in a Berlin taxicab von Neumann had explained in a few sentences much more than he, Kuratowski, would have gotten by correspondence or conversation with other mathematicians about questions of set theory, measure theory, and real variables. Banach, too, talked about him. He told me how at the 1927 Lwów meeting he and other mathematicians, Stozek among them, had made von Neumann drunk at the congress banquet by plying him with vodka, to the extent that he had to leave the table to go to the toilet. He came back and continued the mathematical conversation without having lost his train of thought.
It was only toward the end of 1934 that I entered into correspondence with von Neumann. He was then in the United States, a very young professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. I wrote him about some problems in measure theory. He had heard about me from Bochner, and in his reply he invited me to come to Princeton for a few months, saying that the Institute could offer me a $300 stipend. I met him shortly after my return from England.
In the fall of 1935 a topology conference had been organized in Moscow. Alexandroff invited me to attend. At that time relations between Poland and Soviet Russia were strained. Passport applications in Poland for travel to Russia involved so much red tape that I did not receive my passport in time and thus missed going to the meeting. Von Neumann wrote me that he would be passing through Warsaw on his way back from Moscow, suggesting that we meet there. Samuel Eilenberg, a young Warsaw mathematician well known for his very ingenious topological results, and I went to meet the returning western group. At the station von Neumann (whom I was seeing for the first time) was accompanied by two American mathematicians, Garrett Birkhoff and Marshall Stone. We all conversed in English. Eilenberg spoke it a little; I spoke it adequately thanks to my Cambridge stay. Von Neumann would break into German occasionally.
From Kuratowski's description, I had imagined him to be slim, as he apparently had been in 1927. He was instead rather plump, though not as corpulent as he was to become later. The first thing that struck me about him were his eyes — brown, large, vivacious, and full of expression. His head was impressively large. He had a sort of waddling walk. (This reminds me that when I first saw his grandson, Malcolm, the son of his daughter Marina, I found it uncanny to watch this little three-year-old perambulate down a long hotel corridor with his grandfather's waddle, holding his hands behind his back exactly like Johnny. Since he had been born after his grandfather's death, he could not possibly have been imitating him. It would seem that gestures, motions, and other time-dependent phenomena — not merely static characteristics or matters of spatial configuration — can be transmitted genetically.)
Von Neumann appeared quite young to me, although he was in his early thirties, some five or six years older than I. (I have always had mixed feelings toward people older than myself: on the one hand, something like respect; on the other, a slight feeling of superiority, of having a greater share in the future.) At once I found him congenial. His habit of intermingling funny remarks, jokes, and paradoxical anecdotes or observations of people into his conversation, made him far from remote or forbidding.
During this brief visit, Stone, von Neumann, and Birk-hoff gave a joint seminar at the Warsaw section of the Polish Mathematical Society. Their subject was the lattice theoretical foundations of quantum theory logic. Von Neumann gave most of the lecture, Birkhoff talked briefly, and Stone asked questions. Actually I had mixed impressions about this talk. I was not at all convinced that it had much to do with novel physical ideas. In fact, I thought the points were a bit stretched and the big notion of quantum theory logic a bit artificially contrived. I had a number of other conversations with Johnny, mainly on measure theory (about which I had sent him reprints of my earlier papers). We also talked a little about his recent work on the theory of Hilbert space operators, although I was not especially knowledgeable about or interested in it. Then he gave me some practical advice about my forthcoming trip to Princeton.
In connection with the Moscow topological meeting, several years after World War II, I received a letter from the French mathematician Leray, who with the Lwów mathematician Juliusz Schauder had written a celebrated paper on fixed points for transformations in function spaces and applications in the theory of differential equations. Schauder, our mutual friend, was murdered by the Nazis. Leray wanted to have a photograph of him for himself and for Schauder's daughter who survived the war and lives in Italy. But he could not find any in Poland or anywhere and he wrote me asking whether I might have a snapshot. Some months after Johnny von Neumann's death I was looking at some of the books in his library and a group photo of the participants in the Moscow conference fell out. Schauder was there, as were Alexandroff, Lefschetz, Borsuk, and some dozen other topologists. I sent this photograph to Leray. It has since been reproduced in several publications.
Just as in Lwów, the Warsaw mathematicians gathered in a pastry shop and discussed mathematics for hours. They also frequented the famous Fuker wine shop in the old town. This is where Eilenberg and I took Johnny and his companions to drink Fuker's celebrated hydromel. Here he entertained us with the story of how at the request of Princeton friends he had bought several pounds of caviar in Moscow to bring back to the U.S. and had asked a steward to store it in the icebox of the restaurant car. In the morning when they woke up, in Poland, they discovered that the restaurant car had been uncoupled at the Polish-Russian border. They were returning to the States caviarless! He talked also about his own decision to emigrate to America and the general impracticality and lack of foresight of European scientists. In the German universities the number of existing and prospective vacancies for professorships was extremely small — something like two or three in the entire country for the next two years. Yet most of the two or three score docents counted on obtaining a professorship in the near future. With his typical rational approach, von Neumann computed that the expected number of professorial appointments within three years was three, whereas the number of docents was forty. This is what had made him decide to emigrate, not to mention the worsening political situation, which made him feel that unhampered intellectual pursuits would become difficult. In 1930, he accepted an offer of a visiting professorship at Princeton University, and, in 1933, shortly after the creation of the Institute, he was invited to become the youngest member of the permanent faculty of the Institute for Advanced Studies.