About Privatdozent

Privatdozent is a newsletter on the history mathematics written by @jorgenveisdal. You can follow the newsletter on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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What To Read: Jørgen Veisdal is obsessed with genius, eccentricity and mathematics

This week, we interviewed Jørgen Veisdal, who writes Privatdozent, a publication on the history of mathematics, physics and economics. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. What’s your Substack about in one sentence? Privatdozent…

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2 years ago · 139 likes

Where do I start?

Check out the archive of essays, listed alphabetically below. In addition are newsletters for The Privatdozent Podcast, book recommendations and photo edition.

• Alan Turing in America

• Can We Survive Technology? — John von Neumann (1955)

• Cantor’s Diagonal Argument (1891)

• Cantor and Dedekind’s Early Correspondence (1873-74)

• David Hilbert’s Influence on Economics

• Einstein and Hilbert’s Relativity Race

• Einstein’s Emigration to America (1932)

• Einstein’s Paper on the Photoelectric Effect (1905)

• Gödel's Solution to Einstein’s Field Equations

• Gödel’s Constitutional Quarrel (1940)

• John F. Nash Jr.’s Game of “Hex” (1949)

• John F. Nash Jr.’s Work in Pure Mathematics

• John von Neumann’s Minimax Theorem (1928)

• Karl Menger’s Vienna Colloquium (1928-36)

• Kurt Gödel’s Brilliant Madness

• Louis Bachelier’s Theory of Speculation (1900)

• Nash’s Bargaining Problem (1950)

• On Norbert Wiener’s Relationship with Bertrand Russell

• Oppenheimer’s Letter of Recommendation for Richard Feynman (1943)

• Oskar Morgenstern’s Transformation (1925-38)

• Paul Samuelson’s Flavors of Randomness (2004)

• Ramanujan's First Letter to G.H. Hardy (1913)

• Ramanujan’s Early Work on Continued Fractions

• Richard Feynman's First Lecture (1940)

• Richard Feynman’s Advice to a Young Stephan Wolfram (1985)

• The Absent-Minded Father of Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener

• The Anarchist Abstractionist — Who was Alexander Grothendieck?

• The Beautiful Life of John F. Nash, Jr.

• The Birth of the Institute for Advanced Study (1930)

• The Bohr-Einstein Debate

• The Duties of John von Neumann’s Assistant in the 1930s

• The Eccentricities of J. Robert Oppenheimer

• The Einstein-Szilárd Letter (1939)

• The Golden Age of Quantum Physics (1927)

• The Hardy-Ramanujan Number

• The Legend of Abraham Wald

• The Martians of Budapest

• The Mathematical Center of the Universe

• The Mathematical Nomad, Paul Erdős

• The Mathematics of Ted Kaczynski

• The Median Voter Theorem (1948)

• The Poincaré Conjecture (1904)

• The Riemann Hypothesis, explained

• The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

• Turing Uncomputability

• When Einstein met Churchill (1933)

• When Feynman met Dirac

• When Heisenberg met Einstein

• When Wiener met Einstein (1925)

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