In December 1935 I sailed on the English ship Aquitania from Le Havre on my first transatlantic crossing. The weather was beautiful for the first two days; then a violent storm sprang up, and I became seasick. When the boat approached New York, the sea calmed down and my sea-sickness stopped.
After two days in New York, I tried to reach von Neu-mann in Princeton but got no answer, so I called the Institute. It was quite an experience for me to go into an American telephone booth for the first time. When the operator said, "Hold the wire!" I did not understand the expression and asked "Which wire should I hold?" I reached Solomon Lefschetz, a professor at the University, who told me how to get to Princeton from New York. He said it was very easy, that there were trains every hour. I could not understand that. Princeton I knew was a very small town, why should there be a train every hour? I did not know it was on the main line to Philadelphia and Washington.
In Princeton I went straight to register at the Institute which was housed in Fine Hall, a University building, for it did not have its own quarters yet. A young and pretty Miss Flemming and an older Miss Blake received me. I was greeted with smiles. It surprised me, and I wondered if there was something a little funny about the way I was dressed or whether my trousers were not properly buttoned (there were no zippers in those days).
I checked in at a boarding house and went directly to visit von Neumann in his large and impressive house. A black servant let me in, and there was Solomon Bochner in the living-room and a baby crawling on the floor. (The baby was von Neumann's daughter Marina, six months old at the time.) Marietta, his first wife, also a Hungarian, greeted me. I knew of Bochner since we had corresponded about mathematics. Bochner and von Neumann were talking politics.
Von Neumann expressed great pessimism about the possibility of a war in Europe. (This was about three years before the actual outbreak.) Apparently he had a rather clear picture of the catastrophes to come. He saw Russia as the chief antagonist to Nazi Germany. Believing that the French army was strong, I asked, ''What about France?" "Oh! France won't matter," he replied. It was really very prophetic.
My lodgings were in a boarding house on Vandevanter Street, if I remember correctly. There were six or eight other men there, not all students, and we ate together. I remember how the conversation was at first completely incomprehensible to me although I knew English. The American accent took me by surprise, and I missed most of what was being said. Then after a week I understood everything. This is a common experience, not only with languages but also with mathematics — a discontinuous process. Nothing, nothing, at first, and suddenly one gets the hang of it.
I became a frequent visitor at the von Neumanns who were very sociable and held parties two or three times a week. These were not completely carefree; the shadow of coming world events pervaded the social atmosphere. There I met the Alexanders, who were great friends of the von Neumanns. James Alexander, also a professor at the Institute, was an original topologist, the creator of novel problems and strange "pathological" examples of topological objects. He was the scion of a wealthy family and very eccentric.
At a party a few weeks later, I saw a man who must have been fifty but seemed to me infinitely old — I was twenty-six at the time. He was sitting in a big chair with a nice young lady on his knee. They were drinking champagne. I passed by Johnny and asked, "Who is this gentleman?" "Oh! don't you know? He is von Kárman, the famous aerodynamicist." Von Kárman was one of Johnny's friends. And he added: "Don't you know that he invented consulting?" Von Kárman was one of the first scientists who learned to fly a plane in the first World War. He told me that he had one of the low numbered international flying licenses. His flying experiences directly influenced his ideas about jet engines, which became so important in World War II developments. Much later I came to know him quite well. He used to say that engineers are people who perpetuate the mistakes made in the previous generation. In 1968 I found myself with him in Israel at a meeting on hydrodynamics. By then he was a rich old man. It was his first visit to that country, and he was so moved and impressed by what he saw that he gave away five- and ten-dollar bills as tips to waiters and taxi drivers, no matter what the size of the check.
Johnny was always impressed by people who were successful in political or organizational activities or in physical exploits, and lie cultivated them. It was Johnny who said as we walked past the elegant Gothic Princeton University Chapeclass="underline" "This is our one-million-dollar protest against materialism." I do not know whether this bon mot was his own or not, but it shows his sense of humor about money.
In those days he still called me "Mr. Ulam." Once he said to me as we were driving in the rain and were caught in a traffic jam, "Mr. Ulam, cars are no good for transportation anymore, but they make marvelous umbrellas." I often remember this when I am caught in the traffic jams of today. Johnny always loved cars but he drove somewhat carelessly.
Johnny lived rather sumptuously. The professors at the Institute were the highest paid academics in the United States — paid even more than at Harvard. This tended to create animosities between Institute and University professors. Also their compensation was in sharp contrast to the almost negligible stipends offered to the fellows and visitors of the Institute.
The great name, the great celebrity, the great light, so far as the general public was concerned, was, of course, Albert Einstein. I first met his assistant, Mayer, a mathematician and a strange person. Then I was introduced to Einstein himself and noticed his rather peculiar English. He would say: "He is a very good formula," pointing at something on the blackboard!
A cousin of mine, Andrzej Ulam, a banker, came to New York on business about two months after my arrival, and I invited him to visit me in Princeton. It happened that during that week I was giving a talk in some seminar, and my name was listed on the same page of the Institute's Bulletin as the announcement of Einstein's regular weekly seminar. This impressed him enormously; he mentioned it in a letter home, and my reputation among friends and family in Poland was made.
Hermann Weyl was also a professor at the Institute. I met him in Princeton and went to his home several times. He was a legendary figure, much older than von Neumann. He had the same wide breadth of interests which impresses me so much. My friend Gian-Carlo Rota, now a professor at MIT, told me much later that he had heard Weyl's original symmetry lectures and was enormously impressed. They were a bit heavy, but at the same time they gave a feeling of universal culture. More recently Weyl's purely mathematical schemata or algebraic entities found essential applications as models for the properties of the mysterious neutrino particles and so-called weak interactions important in the beta decay of nuclei.
After Weyl's first wife died he remarried and lived in Switzerland for a time. He was unaware of the rules and regulations governing the length of time a naturalized American citizen may live abroad without returning to this country and still retain his American citizenship. He lost his by negligence. When it happened, everyone was shocked. Members of the Mathematical Society and the National Academy of Sciences wanted to have him reinstated as a U.S. citizen. This required a special bill in Congress, and some friends asked me to intervene with Senator Anderson, whom I knew well, to help in this matter. In the meantime Weyl had collapsed in a street in Zürich while putting a letter in a mailbox and died of a heart attack.