Interesting Facts About Germany: University of Göttingen

My son spent his junior year abroad at the University of Göttingen but never knew about some of its important historical connections.

Randomly, I found out about an interesting educator, Emmy Noether, from the early 1900s.

“What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?”

That was the response of more than one (male) faculty member at the idea of Emmy Noether joining the University of Göttingen to teach mathematics in 1915.

Instead of receiving the title she deserved, Emmy spent years teaching courses, often under the name of a male faculty member.

The official hierarchy dictated that it was HIS course and she was an assistant. More egregiously, she wasn’t paid for her work; she relied on the support of her family to survive.

In 1919 she was permitted to officially teach and she began receiving a small salary in 1922.

As a teacher, Emmy was known to speak loud and fast, for being generous and thoughtful, and genuinely cared about her students.

In addition to being an excellent teacher, she also made numerous significant contributions to research in mathematics and physics.

The other interesting Göttingen fact is something I wasn’t aware of until I watched the Academy Award winning film Oppenheimer.

In 1926, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born. Göttingen was one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical physics. (I didn’t know that fact, either!)

Advertisements

REPORT THIS AD

Founded in 1737 during the Age of Enlightenment, the University of Göttingen is committed to the values of social responsibility of science, democracy, tolerance and justice. (From UG website.)

World War II interrupted the work and lives of most American physicists. In 1942, Oppenheimer was appointed to the Manhattan Project, code name for the project formed to develop an atomic bomb.

My son attended UofG to further his advanced degrees in Germanic languages and literatures, not the world of science.

Because I am THAT KIND OF MOM, I visited him while he was in Germany and spent a week there. I actually stayed in a visitors room in his dorm. This structure was built sometime during the cold war era, at least I think it was, because it was DISMAL and gray and cold and unwelcoming and the bathrooms were hardly luxurious — but it was fun to see the original Angel Boy in action and meet his classmates and friends.

Best of all, I got to be the obnoxiously proud mom as we did a lot of sight seeing and he was able to use his fluent German language skills all over the country.

Except for (and because of) the snowy blizzard debacle, it was a memorable Germany adventure.