Chapter 7. The University of Wisconsin
I traveled to Madison by way of Chicago, where I changed to a smaller train that made several whistle stops, one at a town named Harvard. The irony did not escape me, and I felt fate was playing a cruel joke on me. It did not take long for me to change my outlook completely. I promptly found that the state of Wisconsin had important liberal political traditions, that the famous La Follettes had left their imprint not only on the state capital but on the University as well. The entire physical impression, the landscape, the lakes, the woods, the houses, and the size of the city were most agreeable. Living conditions were a pleasant surprise. I was given a room at the University Club and almost at once met there congenial, intelligent people not only in mathematics and science, but also in the humanities and arts. The rooms were small, with bath, bed, desk, and chairs. (I remembered how in one of Anatole France's novels, the hero, Father Coignard, says, "All one needs is a table and a bed. A table on which to have in turn learned books and delicious meals, a bed for sweet repose and ferocious love!") Downstairs there were comfortable common rooms, a library, dining room, even a game room with billiard tables.
The university was adequately supported by state funds and had extra income from a former professor's discovery of a special treatment of milk, the patent rights for which belonged to the University.
Johnny's friend Eugene Wigner was a physics professor there. I had a letter of introduction to another eminent physicist, Gregory Breit, from Harlow Shapley, the Harvard astronomer with whom I had had pleasant scientific and social contacts during my stay in Cambridge. It was Shapley who discovered the "scale of the universe" by using the luminosity period of the cepheid stars as markers. I quickly made friends with most of the mathematicians — many of them my contemporaries, Steve Kleene the logician, C. J. Everett, Donald Hyers, and others. Being by nature gregarious, I liked living at the University Club, meeting and taking meals with interesting colleagues.
One of them was Vassilief, a Russian émigré, a great expert on Byzantine history, and almost a character out of Nabokov's book Pnin. At dinner, he always ordered a second bowl of soup and would say to me, "Americans are funny; even when the soup is excellent, they never think of ordering a second bowl." Like many Russians, he liked to drink and carried a small flask of vodka in his coat pocket. He must have been in his sixties at the time. Some two years later, when the U.S. Army took over the Faculty Club for its quarters, Vassilief and the other occupants had to find other housing. Vassilief was given a two-room suite in a private house. He was enchanted with this new spaciousness. "It's wonderful," he explained. ''You can sleep in one room and work in the other." And just like Pnin he threw what he called "a house-heating party to celebrate."
Another interesting person was a professor of English literature, a bachelor, Professor Hanley. Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This led quickly to very pleasant relationships. Hanley was a good billiard player. He insisted on teaching me how to play, though he was rather appalled by my ineptitude. This, I found, is a very nice and very American trait — the desire to coach and instruct.
So I found Madison not at all the intellectual desert I had feared it would be. The university had a tradition of excellence in several fields of the natural sciences. It had great expertise in limnology. Limnology, the science of lakes, was developed by an old professor whose name I cannot recall, but who used to say, I was told, that every time he remembered the name of a student he forgot the name of a fish. Biology, too, was strong at the University of Wisconsin, as well as economics and political science. The economist Selig Perlman, and Nathan Feinsinger, who later became nationally known as a labor relations expert, were there at the time among many other eminent professors.
It also seemed that foreigners like myself who were, so to speak, not unpresentable, were well received into the academic community's social life and quickly established good relations with many professors in various fields. The intellectual atmosphere was lively. On the whole the professors did not put on airs as a few have at Harvard. On the contrary, perhaps in order to bear comparison with the famous older universities, they worked more energetically, but the "Oh, excuse me I've got to get to work" syndrome was not as evident as at Harvard.
Something else happened to make Madison most important to me. It was there that I married a French girl, who was an exchange student at Mount Holyoke College and whom I had met in Cambridge, Françoise Aron. Marriage, of course, changed my way of life, greatly influencing my daily mode of work, my outlook on the world, and my plans for the future.
The poet William Ellery Leonard, a tall man with a very large head and a mane of white hair, was one of the interesting and colorful members of the faculty, a great eccentric. The author of the book The Locomotive God, he was reputed to have an intense, neurotic fear of trains. This prevented him from ever leaving the University in Madison; the story was that his salary (which was very low for a full professor) never was increased, because he would never leave anyway. I found this reason rather humorous.
At that time, at many universities deans and chairmen often ran their departments not so much for excellence in scholarly or educational pursuits, but for good economy and efficiency — rather like a business. Indeed, shortly after I arrived, someone pointed out that the marvelous physical location of the campus on the shores of Lake Mendota constituted a part of our salaries, making them a little lower than at other comparable state universities. This made me joke with some of my younger colleagues: every time we looked at the beautiful lake it was costing us about two dollars. At one of the first faculty meetings I attended, Clarence A. Dykstra, the President, very imposing in appearance (and actually a very good man), started his speech with, "All of us face a challenge this year." At this I nudged my neighbor and whispered, "Watch out! This means no raises for the faculty. Sure enough, ten minutes later Dykstra said something to this effect, and my neighbor laughed out loud.
The astronomer Joel Stebbins was a professor in Madison. I enjoyed meeting him and talking to him in the observatory. He had an excellent sense of humor and was a great practical joker. Once on a clear, cold sunny winter Sunday, he drove to our apartment and honked the car horn. I looked out and there he was, saying, "Would you like to come with me to the Yerkes Observatory? There is a meeting of the Astronomical Society there." Yerkes was not far from Madison — about a two-hour drive. I dressed warmly, hurried down and on the way we discussed all kinds of problems. Then teasingly he said: "Would you like to give a talk?" To answer a joke with a joke, I responded, "Yes, for five or ten minutes." Quickly I started to think about what I could say to astronomers in a few minutes. I remembered that once I had been thinking about the mathematics of the way trajectories of celestial bodies might look from a moving system of coordinates and how, by a suitable motion of the observer, one could make complicated-looking orbits appear simpler if one assumed that the observer was himself moving. I called this general question ''The Copernican Problem" and spoke for a few minutes on that. Indeed, it is a worthwhile subject to consider, and it does give rise to some bona fide topological and metric questions in which I had obtained a few simple results.