We discussed various approaches to a possible construction of these transformations. With my usual optimism, I was somehow sure of our ultimate success. We kept G. D. Birkhoff informed of the status of our attacks on the problem. He would smile when I talked to him at dinner at the Society of Fellows, partly amused, partly impressed by our single-minded persistence, and partly skeptical, though he really had an open mind about our chances. He would check what I told him with Oxtoby, a more cautious person. It took us more than two years to break through and to finish a long paper, which appeared in The Annals of Mathematics in 1941 and which I consider one of the more important results that I had a part in.
The chairman of the Society was L. J. Henderson, a famous biologist, author of a book, The Fitness of Environment, which enjoyed a great popularity at the time, not only among specialists, but quite generally. L.J., as he was called, was a great Francophile. Indeed, the Society was molded along the lines of the Fondation Thiers in Paris, rather than on the Cambridge or Oxford systems of fellows in the college.
The Society was composed of some five or six Senior Fellows and about twenty-two Junior Fellows.
The Senior Fellows were well-known distinguished professors, like John Livingston Lowes in literature, Samuel Eliot Morison, the historian, Henderson, and Alfred North Whitehead, the famous English philosopher, who had already retired from his professorship at Harvard when I entered the Society. I often had the pleasure of sitting next to him at the traditional Monday-night dinners of the Society.
Some of the Junior Fellows gave me the impression of being a somewhat precious group of young men, as far as manners were concerned. Oxtoby, Willard Quine (really a logician), and I were the only mathematicians among them. Among the physicists there were several who later became very well known, such as John Bardeen, Ivan Getting, and Jim Fisk. Among the biologists, I remember Robert B. Woodward, the chemist who first synthesized quinine and other important biological substances. Paul Samuelson, the economist who served as advisor to President Kennedy, was there; also Ivar Einerson, a great scholar in linguistics; Henry Guerlach, who became a historian of science; and Harry Levin, in English literature. Levin was rather proustian in his manner. He loved to engage in sophisti cated and what seemed to me occasionally rather precious discussions. Another foreign-born member was George Hanfmann, an archaeologist. Hanfmann was obviously a very learned person, and I appreciated his erudition. We shared the same fondness for Greek and Latin literature.
The logician Willard Quine was friendly and outgoing. He was interested in foreign countries, their culture and history, and knew a few words of Slavic languages, which he used on me with great gusto. He already had made a reputation in mathematical logic. I remember him as slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed — an intense person. During the presidential election of 1936 in which Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Landon, I met him on the stairs of Widener Library at nine in the morning, after Roosevelt's landslide victory. We stopped to chat and I asked him: "Well, what do you think of the results?" "What results?" he replied. ''The presidential election, of course," I said. "Who is President now?" he asked casually. This was characteristic of many in academe. I once heard that, during Charles W. Eliot's presidency at Harvard, a visitor to his house was told, "The President is away in Washington to see Mr. Roosevelt"! (This was Theodore Roosevelt.)
I had my meals at Adams House, and the lunches there were particularly agreeable. We sat at a long table — young men and sometimes great professors; the conversations were very pleasant. But often, towards the end of a meal, one after the other would gulp his coffee and suddenly announce: "Excuse me, I've got to go to work!" Young as I was I could not understand why people wanted to show themselves to be such hard workers. I was surprised at this lack of self-assurance, even on the part of some famous scholars. Later I learned about the Puritan belief in hard work — or at least in appearing to be doing hard work. Students had to show that they were conscientious; the older professors did the same. This lack of' self-confidence was strange to me, although it was less objectionable than the European arrogance. In Poland, people would also pretend and fabricate stories, but in the opposite sense. They might have been working frantically all night, but they pretended they never worked at all. This respect for work appeared to me as part of the Puritan emphasis on action versus thought, so different from the aristocratic traditions of Cambridge, England, for example.
The Society's rooms were in Eliot House. We Junior Fellows would meet there on Mondays and Fridays for lunch, and for the famous Monday-night dinners which gathered Junior and Senior Fellows together around a long T-shaped table which was said to be the one featured in Oliver Wendell Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Henderson had secured it from some Harvard storeroom.
President Lowell attended almost every Monday dinner. He was fond of re-creating the Battle of Jutland of World War I, moving knives and forks and saltcellars around on the dinner table to show the positions of the British and German fleets. From time to time he would also betray his doubts and even remorse about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. He would recount it — not so much to defend but rather to restate the position of the court and the subsequent legal steps. He had been a member of one of the review committees.
Good French Burgundies or Alsatian wines accompanied the meals. These were the pride and joy of Henderson, who once told me that if he ever deserved a statue in Cambridge, he would like to be put in Harvard Square with a bottle of wine in his hands, in commemoration of his having been the first person to obtain University funds for a wine cellar. George Homans, one of the Junior Fellows, a descendant of President John Adams, was one of the young men entrusted with the selection and sampling of wines. I considered it a great distinction when I, too, was put on the wine-tasting committee of the Society. This was my very first administrative job in America! The Society is still very much alive today at Harvard, and it continues to hold its Monday-night dinners where former fellows are always welcome.
In 1936 the depression appeared to be ending. Harvard University seemed relatively untouched by this cataclysm. After the colloquium talk I gave there just before my appointment to the Society of Fellows, I remember Professor William Graustein telling me that at Harvard the professors had not felt the depression at all. This left me wondering at their lack of involvement in the general problems of the country or in the affairs of Massachusetts or even of Cambridge. It was evident that campus life in America meant at least partial isolation from the rest of society. Professors lived almost entirely among themselves and had very little contact with the rest of the professional or creative community as in Lwów. This had both good and bad effects: more time for scholarly work, but very little influence on the life of the country or vice versa. As everyone knows, things changed somewhat after World War II. In the Kennedy administration, for example, Harvardians had a great deal to do with the affairs of government and for a time the influence of scientists became even paramount.
Activities at the Society of Fellows were of course only one facet of my life at Harvard. I had many contacts with the younger members of the faculty at the university and quite often saw and talked with the senior professors and with G. D. Birkhoff himself. His son Garrett, a tall, good-looking, and brilliant mathematician, some two years younger than I, became a friend, and we saw each other nearly every day.