Commentary

Commentary by Dr. Gerhard Falk

        

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.

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