Commentary |
American
Jewish Inventors and Scientists
Jewish
Achievements If
judged by the number of Nobel prize winners in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology,
and other sciences, it seems that Jews are, for some reason, more capable of
scientific achievement than any other ethnic group on earth. In one year six out
of eight Nobel prize winners have been Jewish. This has led to the speculation
that Jews have some kind of superior gene allowing them to have an Einstein
among them. Another speculation holds that Jews are more bookish than other
peoples and therefore achieve more intellectually.
Yet, both of these explanations fail to deal with the facts. The
Nobel Prize in science
is named after the
Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel
, who was not
Jewish. He left a fortune in his will to be awarded to those who excelled in
science for the good of mankind. Since then, the Swedish Academy
has awarded these
prizes to important scientific achievers. There is also another so-called Nobel
Prize, which is political and distributed by members of a Norwegian committee.
They award politicians to their liking with the Nobel Peace Prize, and the
Swedish committee issues a prize in economics. The economics prize was not
included in Alfred Nobel
’s will. The
evidence is that the Jewish predominance in science is about over.
Nobel Prizes in science given today refer to achievements of many years
ago, when there were indeed a large number of Jews disproportionately to their
numbers who were major scientific achievers. That was true because the American
children
of the YIddish
speaking immigrants
to the United
States at the beginning of the 20th century lived in abject poverty
.
Therefore, it became a shortcut to escape from the ghetto by studying
science or by entering boxing or by investing in the movies. These enterprises
were not of interest to well earning native born Americans. These activities
were used by the poor to gain access to money, recognition, and security. Other
immigrants, not Jewish, also found ways of escaping the poverty of the
sweatshops
. Before
1970 it was almost certain that there were a disproportionate number of Jewish
names on the “Dean’s List
” of outstanding
achievements of college students. These excellent students became the Nobel
Prize winners of later years. After 1970, and certainly in the 21st
Century, the Jewish predominance in college achievement
has declined so
much that it is no longer visible. Now students with Japanese names predominate.
The American Jewish population
are no longer
living in the ghetto. Most American Jews
, at least 85%, are
native born Americans who no longer need to escape abject poverty
. Comfortable as
Americans in their own country, no longer the victims of European persecutors or
American labor exploiters, the American Jew is at home, and equal of other
citizens. Now Jews need not excel in college and they don’t. Indeed, the
Jewish population of the United States includes more college graduates than is
true of the average American population, in that 80% of American Jews attend
college
as compared to 29%
of all other Americans. However, that 80% are by no means outstanding scholars.
They don’t need it. They can enter into their parents’ real estate business
or become lawyers or go into politics. Therefore,
Jewish predominance in science is over. The Nobel Prize winners of yesteryear
are still the luminaries of today, although they are the last generation of
great Jewish American achievers. Jewish
American Inventors There
are a number of scientific inventions by American Jews
. One of these is
the laser
, invented by the
physicist Theodore Maiman
, who first fired a
laser in 1960. “Laser” is an acronym for “light amplification by
stimulated emission of radiation.” Maiman’s work was based on the
theoretical physics by Albert Einstein
. The physicist
Alferov, also Jewish, improved the laser when he invented the heterojunction
transistor, which can handle extremely high frequencies. This made it possible
to transfer information from satellites to earth. Robert
Adler
was born in Vienna
(Wien) in 1913. He earned a doctorate in physics at the university of Vienna in
1937 . Escaping the German invasion of Austria (Östreich), he went to England
and later to
Chicago. He joined Zenith Radio in 1941. In the course of his research, he
developed noise guards for television. but is best known for the wireless
television remote control. He also pioneered acoustic surface wave research,
which led to the creation of color television and optical disk players. Adler
was granted over 150 US patents. In 1958, Adler received the Outstanding
Technical Achievement Award, and later was cited for numerous other achievements
. In 1980 he won the Edison Medal and was elected to numerous scientific
organizations. Paul
Zoll
, a cardiologist, is
responsible for he defibrillator
and the pacemaker,
two inventions which have saved innumerable lives of cardiac patients. In
1972, the Jewish American scientist Paul
Berg
invented
genetically modified food. His methods allowed the mass processing of insulin
and make crops disease resistant. Berg also researched DNA molecules. Edward
Teller
is known as “the
father of the hydrogen bomb.” He was associated with the construction of the
atomic bomb
, which led to the
surrender of Japan ending the 2nd World War. His invention was given
little attention until President Harry Truman promoted the development of the
hydrogen bomb before the Soviet Union could produce this deadly weapon. Ralph
H. Baer
was born
in 1922 in Berlin, Germany. At age 14 he was expelled from school for being
Jewish. He came to the United States
and accepted several jobs in the electronics industry. During the Second
World War
, Baer served in the
military intelligence unit of the US Army in London, England
. After the war, he
used the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act
, usually called
“The GI Bill of Rights,” to enter he American Television Institute
in Chicago. He
later moved to New York
, where he worked
for an electronics firm. He was assigned the job of overseeing 500 engineers
engaged in the development of electronics systems. Baer,
who was largely self-taught, conceived the idea in 1966 of playing games on a
television. He created a home video console. At retirement, Baer had accumulated
150 patents. Baer was literally “the father of the videogame industry.” In
2006 he was awarded the National Medal of Technology. Baer
married Dena Whinston in 1955. They had three children
. Ruth
Mosko Handler
was born
in Denver, Colorado in 1916. She was the president of the toy manufacturer
Mattel, a company with 18,000 employees and annual
sales of over $300 million. In 1959 she invented the Barbie
doll, which sold
over a billion copies worldwide. Ruth
Mosko married Elliot Handler in 1938. Elliot
and his partner Harold Matson invested in a
furniture factory which they called Mattel using “Matson” and “Elliot”
to create the name. Late they decided to enter the toy business. Ruth and Elliot
had a daughter, Barbara, who, as a small child, played with dolls, acting out
future events rather than the present. Noticing that paper dolls disintegrated
easily, Ruth Handler invented a three dimensional doll with an adult body and a
clothes line. She called her doll “Barbie
” after her
daughter. She then advertised in the Disney television show “The Mickey Mouse
Club
,” leading the
family and Mattel into a huge fortune. Later, Ruth Handler gave “Barbie” a
toy boyfriend called Ken, the name of her son. Ruth
Handler was inducted into the U.S. business Hall of Fame. Morris
Michron
was born
in 1870. He grew up in New York
. He and his wife
made stuffed animals after Morris got home from selling candy during the day. A
cartoonist, Clifford Berryman, depicted President Theodore Roosevelt and called
the president “Teddy.” Michron created a small “teddy bear” and sent it
to Roosevelt, who gave permission to use his name. The “bear” was first sold
in 1902, leading to the founding of the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co.
[iv] This
small sample of inventions by American Jews
is only a fragment
of all the contributions made by the children
of the eastern
European Jews
who came to America
between 1884 and 1924. The
German Jewish Refugees It
is often overlooked that one of the ironies of history was the expulsion of all
Jews from Germany
after 1933 when
Hitler became German dictator. That expulsion led to revolution of American
science similar to the influx of the Greek scholars who came to Italy after the
Muslims
invaded
Constantinople in 1453. By
1944, more than 133,000 German Jewish refugees had entered the United States
. One fifth were
college graduates; the others were white collar employees. The National Refugee
Service
listed 9,000
lawyers, 2,000 physicians
, 1,500 writers, and
2,400 academics. Some
excellent examples of German Jewish scientists whose influence continues to this
day, as their former students and subsequent graduate students continued their
legacy, are: There
is total unanimity among the foreign born intellectuals of recent years
concerning the role of the academic community as a means of Americanization vis
a vis the role of the religio-ethnic enclaves.
All agree that the academic community was of great help to them in
becoming Americanized in fitting into the general community. A
considerable agreement also exists that the foreign born are mainly “marginal
men
,” i.e., that they
have only achieved partial assimilation. None
of the intellectuals felt close to either the German, Jewish, or the Polish
subcultures to whom they might have normally looked for support during the
transition from one culture to another. On the contrary, the ethnic groups were, in the main, avoided
by the intellectuals while the campus community
was embraced
wholeheartedly. There
are several reasons for this attitude. The
foreign born intellectuals agree first, then the relationship between highly
trained as scholars to leave their discipline is far greater than their
relationship to any nationality or subculture.
They all believe in an international community of scholars
who know no
religion or ethnicity but only scholarly competence. Several professors stated that they were treated with every
consideration by their American colleagues, that they were given every
opportunity to prove themselves academically, and that their foreign origins
were never a hindrance two of them. One
scholar remarked that when he was promoted and given salary increases during a
short interval of time, despite his expectations to the contrary, he felt no
signs of hostility among his colleagues. The
scholars also agree that their social life and their friends derived from the
campus rather than the ethnic community. All further attest that the ethnic groups proved remote to
them. They simply had no interest
in continuing to present the image of a “foreigner” and therefore avoided
such contacts. A slight degree of
self-hatred
is evident in many
of the scholars, for they seem to have made every effort to emphasize their lack
of involvement in the ethnic group whence they came.
This, of course, would not be true of Jewish scholarly refugees of the
traditional bent, but few of these came to the United States.
It is possible that the negative relationship between the scholars and
the ethnics came from both sides, not one.
With striking inconsistency, the intellectuals were angry at the lack of
help they received from the Anerican foreign-born community while simultaneously
they felt themselves almost degraded by such associations. Only one of the intellectuals said that he read a foreign
language newspaper or spoke the native tongue at home.
All others spoke only English at home, yet retained pronounced accents.
Possibly this habit was especially pronounced among scholars, for they
needed fluency in English is a teaching tool.
A typical comment by one professor of medicine will illustrate the views
held by many intellectuals: “We
were given every consideration. Almost
immediately upon her arrival we were invited to the homes of our colleagues and
offered every hospitality and friendship. The
same attitude held true on the campus. Students and professors went out of their way to make life
easier. We always felt as equals
and never noticed any discrimination. My
wife was accepted in the various social organizations on the campus.
Students were forthcoming and helpful.” In
view of these experiences it is evident that one important reason for the lack
of communication between the intellectuals and the ethnics was the fact that the
help they needed came from the campus community
.
The purpose of ethnic enclaves has always been the reception of
immigrants
into a friendly
community in a world otherwise foreign and often hostile.
But, the academic environment
was not a foreign
community to scholars. Hence, there
was no need to become substantially involved in the ethnic group.
It is easy to disdain what we do not need. All
of the intellectuals felt that a status-role
change was
pronounced upon their arrival here. There
were two changes which especially were evidenced.
First, the change from the status of the hounded refugee from Nazi
atrocities
, and second, the
change from the European to the American intellectual climate. Immigrant
intelligentsia all agreed that they would have been annihilated had they stayed
in Europe. This was not only true
for Jews but also for gentile Poles who were unable to carry out their duties
during the occupation of their country by the Germans.
One man recollects that the German authorities listed the most prominent
scholars at Polish universities
as hostages to be
executed in case of resistance to the German military command
.
As a consequence, many very prominent men were killed by the Germans as
revenge are retribution when Nazis were attacked by the Polish underground.
This scientist believes the Polish civilization and science received a
devastating blow from the Germans because the country’s best scholars were
either murdered or else fled the country. Consequently,
a new generation of students and scholars could not well grow where the best men
were not available to train them. The
second status change felt by most of the immigrant intellectuals was the
difference in attitude toward professors or intellectuals generally.
In Europe, the before and after the Nazi period, intellectuals are held
in very high esteem. Professors were considered the upper elite
, treated with great
respect and honor, and were well paid. The
adjustment of the European professors to academic life in America depended
therefore in part also on a reorientation to the European professor to his new
status-role
. Status-role
is the sum of privileges and obligations of any person in any social system.
Thus, the liberal
arts college was
unknown to the European intellectuals because it does not exist in the old
world. In turn, alumni loyalty to a
liberal arts college is also unknown. Instead,
European students feel loyalty toward their major professor and consider
themselves students of the man rather than of a university.
Furthermore, the liberal arts college places a great deal of emphasis and
the teaching ability of a professor, while the European university
places all the
emphasis and scholarship, for here the “publish or perish” syndrome began.
In addition, a close and intense student teacher relationship existed in
many American colleges and universities prior to the rise of the
multi-university, but this was utterly unknown and in fa t actually discouraged
in European institutions of higher education
. Therefore,
European scholars generally felt more at home in the American graduate school
because such
schools offered research opportunities similar to those in Europe, and because
such schools owe so much of their structure to of the German universities
.
Nevertheless, even here, the European professor often felt that he was
asked to spend more time on the dissertation work of graduate degree candidates
than was true in European schools, were PhD dissertation requirements were less
rigid. Professors whose field was
not liberal
arts but medicine,
law, or one of the other pragmatic professions were beset with still another
difficulty. The American medical
and law schools
are very often
purely pragmatic and professionally oriented.
Consequently, some European professors found themselves initially out of
step with the American schools not only because they did not understand the
state examination requirements so important to such schools, but also because
they have a purely research orientation. In
fact, lawyers and physicians
were faced with an
entirely different type of educational and practical system in their professions
in the United States and often could not have practiced in this country without
additional education. While
European universities
are all government
controlled and hence under uniform academic standards for each country, this is
not true in the United States. Thus, differences in quality and accreditation made it
particularly difficult for some of the European scholars to adjust to American
professional schools
.
Such professors soon discovered that the designation “college” or
“university” meant little concerning the quality or function of a school. European
professors also have to adjust to a different type of administration faculty
relationship. In Europe, professors
are civil servants. They have
considerable independence, and, until the Nazi takeover, never faced the type of
political and sometimes clerical pressure existing here.
European universities
do not have
departments, as is true here. In
Europe, the professors, called ordinarius
, have the full
power of the university in their hands. No
one except the ordinarius has any say about curriculum, appointments,
examinations, research, or general policy.
Nearly every European ordinaries is also director of the institute or
seminar with assistance, one or two secretaries, a library and/or a laboratory
over which he has complete control. Assistants
to the ordinarius
have achieved the
doctorate, but are called docents
.
They have no status with the University that are paid by the professor,
and may be hired and fired at will. The
docent remains in that position until the professor either retires or dies, when
one of them, already advanced to middle age, becomes the ordinarius himself. Thus,
the European intellectual, suddenly faced with a great change in status-role
, had to make some
significant internal psychological adjustments. He also had to change his style of teaching, as the European
method of reading in a monologue could not be done here.
The great distance between professor and student in Europe was not
visible here. Furthermore, the
authority of the professor
was less in the
United States long before the present student revolt.
Finally, the European had to change his style of writing and speaking,
not only because he had to learn the English language, but also because English
is less cumbersome and simpler than German, a language which was used by all
continental Europeans
and published
research. Psychological
adjustments to the loss of home was a heavy burden. The migrants had not only lost their position and a security,
but also whatever wealth they had accumulated.
They could no longer feel a sense of belonging to a certain nationality;
it was a shock to discover they were no longer German or Austrian.
For many, a loss of their home could not ever be compensated.
Some said that they were eternal emigrants, rootless, and nowhere at
home. This was a minority, a larger
group feeling that their home was in America.
Nevertheless, for all those affected, the forced migration was a
tremendous expansion of energy and diversion from other scientific and teaching
endeavors. This is visible in the
fact that for almost all of the intellectuals, the migration meant a period of
unproductive silence during which the immigrant reestablished himself, learned
English in sought, often in vain, suitable academic positions
.
No one will ever know how much talent and ability was destroyed in the
psychic trauma. The
migration of intellectuals to the United States was not, of course, an organized
movement. It was instead the result
of chance, family ties
, and individual
initiative
which brought the
immigrants
to rhe United
States. The
migration cannot be charged as a whole as either a success or failure, but has
to be viewed as a pattern of the individual destinies.
How much each migrant lost because of his flight cannot be determined. It
is noteworthy that all of the intellectuals were willing to relate to their home
country in some way. None wanted to
return, yet all were interested in visiting and attending academic conferences.
This was as true of German Jews
as Polish Catholics
.
This is interesting because the vast majority of non-academic German
refugees, particularly Jews, scrupulously avoid visits to the fatherland.
These
German Jews
were often the
targets of anti-Jewish sentiment
in the United
States and all kinds of administrative “red tape” hurdles. Many of the
United States consuls in Germany were reluctant to give visas to Jewish
applicants and were encouraged by President Roosevelt
to limit the number
of German Jews asking for visas to enter the U.S.A. Once in the United States,
many of the German Jews found it difficult t find employment. Anti-Jewish
bigotry was particularly strong in American universities in the 1930s and 1940s.
As a result, many Jewish emigres were unable to access the resources needed to
do adequate research in many fields of study. For example, the chemistry giant
firm Du Pont rejected “the father of biochemistry Carl Neuberg
because he looked
too Jewish
”. The
German Jewish scientists who came to America arrived in ever growing numbers
after the Nazi government
passed “The Law
for the Restoration of the German Civil Service.” in
1933. restoration meant dismissal of all Jewish professors from German
universities
. Where German
Jewish refugee scholars were employed, that recognition attracted native
scholars. That
recognition led to the inclusion of many refugee scientists in the development
of the atomic bomb
, which the German
Nazi government
attempted to
develop without success because so many outstanding scientists left Germany and
settled in the U.S.A. Peter
Moeser
, a Stanford
economist, wrote that U.S. patents increased by 31 percent because of the
activities of German Jewish scientists who fled Nazi Germany. According to
Moeser, this innovative influence rippled through American science for
generations. In fact, it has been suggested that the German Jewish refugees
revolutionized American science
. Moeser claims that
these scientists trained a new generation of American scientists who became
productive in the 1940’s and beyond. Some
American Jewish Scientists Albert
Einstein
was a German born
physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and who
won a Nobel prize in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
Einstein left Germany as he was threatened by the Nazi dictator, and moved to
the United States, where he became a citizen. Albert’s
father was an engineer who manufactured electrical equipment. Albert not only
excelled in mathematics; he also played the violin. As an adolescent, Albert
wrote a paper concerning the “State of Ether in a Magnetic Field.” After
his family moved to Italy, Albert enrolled in a technical college in Zurich
, Switzerland, where
he became a Swiss citizen. In 1902, Einstein became a clerk in the Swiss patent
office. While there he began to investigate the “Principle of Relativity.”
In 1905, he published four papers in the “Annalen der Physik.” These papers
were a defining occasion not only for Einstein’s career, but for physics. In
1903 he married Millie Maric. They had a daughter, Lisel, whose later life has
never been uncovered, as she disappeared from the Einstein household. The couple
had two sons, Hans Albert, who became an American hydraulic engineer, and
Edward, a schizophrenic
who lived out his
life in an institution. In 1919, the Einsteins divorced. In that same year,
Albert married his cousin Elsa Loewenthal. She died in 1936. Einstein’s
theories included the background for the development of atomic energy and the
atomic bomb
. In 1915 Einstein
completed his “Theory of General Relativity
,” which he
considered his life’s work. The theory was tested by prominent physicists and
found accurate in 1919. Einstein showed that tiny quantities of matter could be
converted into huge amounts of energy, leading to the atomic bomb. In
1933, Einstein accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton, N.J.
While there he wrote to President Roosevelt
, alerting him to
the effort of the Nazi Germans to build an atomic bomb
. That led to the
establishment of atomic research team at Los Alamos, N.M. Einstein
died in 1955 at age 76. His body was cremated, but his brain is preserved at
Princeton University
. Studies showed
that his inferior parietal lobe, which determines mathematical ability, was 15%
wider than in normal people. Einstein’s
very name has become an iconic symbol, as in, “I’m no Einstein.” He will
always be one of the greats in science, like Newton , Copernicus, and Galileo. Julius
Robert Oppenheimer
was
director of the Los Alamos Laboratory
during the
development of the atomic bomb
. He was chairman of
the Central Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was called
“the father of the atomic bomb.” Oppenheimer
was born in New York
City in 1904. His
family were German Jews
. He earned a
doctorate at the German university at Göttingen. At
the Los Alamos project, Oppenhemer invited a number of prominent Jewish
scientists who had fled Nazi Germany. These scientists produced an atomic bomb
in 1945. Two such
bombs were used to force Japan to surrender to the United States after both
Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
were obliterated on
being bombed with atomic bombs in August of 1945. When Oppenheimer saw the
devastation caused by these bombs, he resigned from the Los Alamos project. Then
he was deprived of his security
clearance. Despite political maneuvers by anti-Jewish elements on the Atomic
Energy Commission, President John F. Kennedy
gave Oppenheimer
the Enrico Fermi Award, named after the famous Italian physicist who had been
director of the Manhattan Project
and the creator of
the first nuclear reactor. Oppenheimer
was never a member of the Communist party
. However, he
financially supported the Republican cause in the Spanish civil war. He was also
interested in a woman who wrote for the “Western Worker,” a communist
newspaper. Oppenheimer married Katherine Pruening in 1940. She had been married
three times before and had relations with Oppenheimer while still married to her
third husband. That caused a so-called “scandal “ at that time. They had two
children
. While
married to Pruening, Oppenheimer continued his relationship with Jean Tatloc, a
communist. All this led the FBI to open a file on Oppeneimer in 1941, so that he
was under investigation by the FBI throughout the development of the atomic bomb
. He was added to a
list of people to be arrested in case of a national emergency.
In the 1950’s, Oppenheimer was removed from his security status as
the McCarthy hearings created an
anti-Communist hysteria in the US affecting many scientists, actors, and
government officials. Baruch
S. Blumberg
won the
Nobel Prize for his discovery of the hepatitis B vaccine. He was born in
Brooklyn in 1925 and died in 2011. Blumberg
studied at Union College, at Oxford University
in England
, and at Columbia
University
. He was married to
Jane Lieberman, with whom he had four children
. Blumberg
was a physiologist and biochemist. In 1976, Blumberg won the Nobel prize in
Physiology and Medicine. He was president of the America Philosophical Society Blumberg
‘s parents were orthodox
Jews who sent him
to a school in which he learned the Hebrew
language
. In World War II
, Blumberg served as
a naval officer. After the war, he
graduated from Union College, and then earned an M.D. at Columbia University
. He then earned a
Ph.D. in physiology at Oxford University
. Blumberg
then traveled the world taking blood samples until he discovered an antigen in
the blood of an Australian aborigine
. He then developed
a vaccine which prevented the development of chronic hepatitis B and associated
liver cancer. He freely gave his discovery to pharmaceutical companies, leading
to a reduction in the infection rate of hepatitis b to 1%. Consequently,
Blumberg was elected to numerous leading positions in various scientific
organizations. Shortly before his death, he told an interviewer that he was
motivated by the Jewish dogma that “If you save one life, you save the whole
world.”. He was one of the few Jewish scientists who remained a practicing
Jew, until he died in 2011 at age 85. John
von Neumann
was born
in Budapest. He used the “von”
as it depicted German nobility, although his family was Hungarian Jews. His
birth name was Janos Lajos. He began his American career as professor of
mathematics, but was not successful, as he had no patience and sought to teach
at a speed not understood by undergraduates. He therefore was appointed to the
Institute for Advanced Studies
, also located in
Princeton. He used his mathematical knowledge to help the war effort during the
Second World War
. Von
Neumann was a child prodigy
who could
understand calculus at age eight. He learned English, Italian, German, and
French. He enrolled in the University of Berlin in 1925, where he studied
chemistry. In 1922 and 1923, he published two papers on mathematics
and then studied chemical engineering at a Swiss university in Zurich
. In 1926, he
received the Ph.D. degree in mathematics at the University of Budapest
. He then continued
to study mathematics at Göttingen University in Germany. In 1928, Neumann began
teaching at the University of Berlin, and continued to publish in mathematics.
After a short stay at the university of Hamburg, he was invited by Princeton
University
in 1930. In 1931 he
became a full professor and continued to write. He became a professor at the
Institute for Advanced Studies
in 1933. Neumann
became a citizen of the United States in 1937. In 1943 he was invited to join
the Manhattan Project
, as the building of
an atomic bomb
was called. After
the Second World War
, Neumann worked as
a consultant to the U.S. army and proposed building a hydrogen bomb. Neumann
was married to Mariette Kovisi. They had one child., Maria, who became a
professor of business administration. They
divorced in 1937. In 1938, Neumann
married Klara Dan, a computer programmer.
They had no children
. In 2005, Neumann
was depicted on a 37 cent postage stamp. There
can be little doubt that Neumann was an extra ordinary intellect and
mathematician. Since the vast majority of mankind is devoid of mathematical
knowledge, his contributions cannot be understood but by the
few. Tamara
Friedlander
was a
bio-mathematician at the Harvard School of Public Health. Born in Uruguay, she
came to the United States in 1973 to begin a career at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
, earning a
doctorate in 1979. She became a US citizen and was recruited by Harvard
university to be a member of the Faculty of Biostatistics. Later she joined the
Harvard School of Public Health. She was instrumental in studying the reasons fo
epidemics as well as several other diseases. Her research led to a series of
lectures on epidemiology at Cambridge University
in England
. Friedlander
established international collaboration on the study of infectious diseases. She
also discovered that HIV can result from sexual behavior. In
1998, Friedlander filed a lawsuit against Harvard University for sex
disrimination after she was refused tenure
despite strong
recommendations from other Harvard scholars. The lawsuit demanded $1 million in
damages and promotion to professor and tenure. Several magazines and newspapers
covered the progress of the lawsuit.
A jury decided in favor of Friedlander. However, the judge overturned the
jury verdict and on appeal Friedlander lost again. The
academic profession is highly competitive and therefore subject to personal
prejudices and campus politics. The prize among professors is lifetime “tenure
” (Latin to hold).
The reason for tenure is to protect scholars from outside political vendettas on
the grounds of written material which some alumni or politicians may not like.
The consequences of tenure are also that many tenured professors do nothing more
for during their entire professional careers. Shafi
Goldwasser
was bom
in New York
City in 1958. She
graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and earned a Ph.D. from the University
of California. In the course of her career, she won the Grace Murray Hopper
Award, the Goedel Prize, the Emanuel Piore Award, and the ACM Turing Award. Her
work includes computer science and cryptography. She
is Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
, and Professor of
Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute, and founder of Duality
Technologies and the Simmons Institute for Computing in Berkeley, California. Shafi
Goldwasser
joined MIT in 1983
and in 1997 became RSA Professor. Goldwasser
has researched computational complexity theory and computational number theory.
She is co-inventor of probabilistic encryption and zero knowledge proofs and a
number of other original findings in mathematical theory. Goldwasser
has received an extraordinary number of awards for her contributions to
mathematics and in 2004 was elected to the National Academy of Science
. In 2005, she was
also elected to the National Academy of Engineering. There followed a host of
other recognitions for her outstanding work. She is featured in Notable
Women in Computing Playing Cards. Gerty
Theresa Radnitz Cori
was born in 1896 in
Prague and died in America in 1957. She was the third woman to win a Nobel Prize
and the first woman to win a Nobel prize in physiology and medicine, at a time
when women
were seldom
admitted to a medical school. She married in Europe and came to the United
States in 1922. She and her husband Carl published a number of papers on medical
research after gaining an M.D. in Europe. In 1947 she received the Nobel Prize
in physiology and medicine
. Gerty
Raditz’ father was a chemist who invented a method of refining sugar. At
sixteen she decided to become a physician. Despite prejudices against women
in medicine, she
was admitted to a university medical school in Prague, graduating in 1920. She
then moved to Vienna and worked in a children
’s hospital,
leading to her first publication on blood disorders. She and her husband moved
to Buffalo, New York
, where she was
appointed to the Roswell Pak Cancer Institute
. In 1928 she became
a citizen of the United States. In 2004, her work was designated a National
Historic Chemicals Landmark. She
died in 1957 after an illness of ten years. She gained numerous awards and
honors for her achievements. Harry
Fuerstenberg
was born
in Berlin, Germany in 1935. In 1938 almost all synagogues
in Germany and
Austria were burned down and Jews were indiscriminately arrested for being
Jewish and sent to death camps. The Fuerstenbergs escaped and came to the United
States. They lived in New York
City. Harry
graduated from Yeshiva University
in 1955. Within a
year he published two papers in the Mathematical Monthly. He then earned a Ph.D.
in mathematics at Princeton University
. From 1959-1960, he
taught at MIT and continued at the University of Minnesota the next year.
Although promoted to “full” professor
, he moved to Israel
in 1965 to accept a
position in Jerusalem at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics
. He stayed in
Jerusalem until 2003 and then became associated with the Ben Gurion Unversity in
southern Israel. In 1993, Fuerstenberg won two prizes in mathematics. He was
inducted into the American Academy of Science and Humanities and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the US National
Academy of Sciences
. In
1958 Fuerstenberg married Rochelle Cohen. They have five children
and sixteen
grandchildren. Murray
Gell-Mann
was born
in lower Manhattan into a Jewish family who came from
Austria (Östreich). Murray graduated from a “preparatory school” at
age 14 and then was admitted to Yale. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale
in 1947 and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1951. Gell-Man
began his career at the University of Illinois, continued at Columbia University
and spent the years
1955 to 1998 at the California Institute of Technology
when he retired. In
1955 Gell-Mann made several important discoveries related to cosmic ray
particles. He is also responsible for he Gell-Mann-Okubo formula. Murray
Gell-Mann
then participated
with a number of mathematicians and physicists in the discovery of quarks and
other phenomena. He coined the name “quantum chromodynamics” and supported
the investigation of “string theory
,” which Einstein
had rejected. In
1994 Gell-Mann wrote a popular science book The
Quark and the Jaguar. In 2019 George Johnson published a biography of Gell-Mann,
Murray Gell-Mann
and the Revolution in 20th Century Physics. Gell-Mann
married Margaret Dowd in 1955. They had a daughter and a son. Dowd died in 1981.
Gell-Mann then married Marcia Southwick in 1992. After his death, a commentator
wrote “losing Murray is like losing the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the course
of his career Murray Gell-Mann
received
innumerable awards and honors, as he was a major contributor to physics in the
20th century. Sergey
Brin
was born
in Moscow, Russia
, in 1973. Brin came
to the United States with his family at age six. His father and mother are
mathematicians. Both his parents held scientific jobs in Russia, but were both
fired when they applied for an exit visa . The then lived at a marginal
existence on part time jobs until they were granted exit visas in 1979. After
arriving in the United States his father was appointed a professor of
mathematics at the University of Maryland. Serge earned a bachelor’s degree at
the University of Maryland in mathematics and computer science. He then went to
Stanford University
, intending to earn
a Ph.D., but suspended his graduate studies when he met Lawrence Page. Together
they developed the
Brin-Page algorithm, which they used to build a web search engine. Using
inexpensive parts from old computers, they connected hardware to Stanford’s
network. This succeeded in gaining enough computer power so that the search
engine could handle multiple users . In 1998, they had
ten thousand
searches a day. It has been said that not since Gutenberg
invented
movable printing has the search
for
information been so
profoundly affected as it was by Google
, as Brin and Page
called their search engine. Googol
is a mathematical
term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. Sergey Brin married Anne Wojcicki in 2007. They were divorced in 2015. In 2018 he married Nicole Shanahan. With her he has three children . It has been estimated that Brin is worth $61 billion. He became a citizen of the United States in 1979. Shalom u'vracha. Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including 30 books and 45 journal articles. |
|