Because my family lived in Madison, Wisconsin, and residents of the state paid no tuition, it was a foregone conclusion that I would attend the University of Wisconsin. Great as is my respect and affection for that institution, I regret in some ways that automatic decision, for it left me living at home when I badly needed being dumped out into the world. Although my older and more socially talented brother was asked to join a fraternity his freshman year, this was not repeated in my case. I felt crushed. Later I did join a fraternity, but I was not active in its social program. In retrospect I consider the whole fraternity business a completely silly one, nearly useless to those who are selected, and often cruel to those who are not. The institution is most strongly and clearly condemned by the characteristics of those who defend it.
But at home, and with almost no competing attractions, I worked hard. As soon as I had established a university record, I was permitted to elect a heavy schedule—seventeen to twenty-one credits a semester. Early in my sophomore year I began to sense the semantic error that had previously equated the words "engineering" and "science." I do not mean to imply that I did not appreciate and enjoy the strictly engineering subjects, for I did. In those days one
could enroll at Wisconsin for a five-year course that earned
The awakening occurred during the first semester of my second year when, according to the now outdated system then in use, my sophomore mathematics subject was differential calculus. Not only did I then for the first time meet a really poetic branch of mathematics, all alive with excitement and power and logical beauty—I had the great good fortune to have a truly great teacher.
a professional degree—in my case that of C.E.—and I stuck out the whole five years and have never for a moment regretted that I did so, even though I have never explicitly made use of this civil engineering training.
Charles Sumner Slichter, applied mathematician, chairman of the department in my student days and dean of the graduate school in my early teaching days, was a towering figure of a man. He deserves a whole book, and I understand one is presently to be written. He was a Renaissance man, physically vigorous, penetrating in his thought and comments, handsome with his great mane of iron-gray hair, explosive alike in his humor and his disdain for the dull and commonplace, full of zest for the whole of life. If he had been born in the seventeenth century he would have been one of the leaders in the formation of the Royal Society Club of England, a lively and fully participating member of the group that met at the Boar's Head Tavern to drink ale, eat thirteen courses, and argue all night about
To have him as an undergraduate teacher of calculus was a truly marvelous experience. The high-school mathematics of my period was on the whole a pretty dull business, but calculus, with its graceful and profound capacity for science, philosophy, art, and life.
dealing with change, was something strikingly new and
exciting. From my point of view Slichter was an absolutely ideal teacher, certainly the greatest I ever had. He was careless, even contemptuous, about unimportant details; but the dramatic power of the analytic tools of mathematics to explore natural phenomena was spread before us by him as it could have been by Newton himself. I must admit that he both confused and frightened some of the poorer students. I recall an earnest boy who asked the professor a stupid question. Slichter paused for several ominous seconds, and then with unexpected calm said, "Bill, suppose you stay after class and ask the janitor."
Slichter, my respect, admiration—and eventually affection—for him steadily grew. Of his four distinguished sons, the scientist son, Louis Byrne Slichter, one of our country's leading geophysicists, had been an earlier acquaintance and became my friend in university days. He has over all the intervening years grown to be one of my very closest friends.
Over the years in which I took course after course with
Following his most active teaching period, Slichter was an imaginative, if admittedly unorthodox, dean of the graduate school. In his office one day, he called me to his desk and said with evident glee, "Here's a chap I am certainly going to let into the graduate school. Look at his transcript! See what judgment he used in picking courses to flunk in!" I get a particular charge out of this story as I look at my eighth-grade report card, which lists 98 in drawing, 97 in algebra, English, and music—but a very low mark in both spelling and deportment.
was influential, wise, and sympathetically on my side. When
Professor Slichter was my scientific godfather. Whenever a critical moment arose as my program developed, he
his colleagues wanted a portrait of him painted, the dean characteristically refused to sit for hours (I can imagine him saying "like a dummy"), but a fine artist was located who agreed to work on the basis of one sitting at which he would make a pencil portrait sketch, plus one other short session at which the artist would make only a palette of tints and colors of skin, eyes, hair. The pencil portrait turned out to be superb, and Slichter had a few copies made of it. He had, in fact, five made, for his four sons and for me. Very few things in my life have given me the satisfaction I had when the dean handed me my copy and remarked, "I had one made for each of my boys."
I had other splendid undergraduate teachers, notably Arnold Dresden, who later had a long career at Swarthmore. He was a real scholar, a gifted linguist, and an able and enthusiastic musician. He was a bearded sophisticated gentleman of European background, and I was as yet not fully emerged from Reedsburg; but he invited me to his home, and thrilled me by insisting that as friends we should use first names. Life was indeed beginning to open up new and happier horizons.
I had my first really tough mathematics subject under Dresden—theory of functions of a real variable. By my junior year I clearly realized that I was going to go on with advanced mathematical training, and I devoted all the slack in my schedule to electives in that department. So in my fifth year, still technically an undergraduate engineer, I was in Arnold Dresden's class, exposed to the initially bewildering abstractions of the theory, developed by the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918), which placed the definition of irrational numbers on a strictly
logical basis. It almost killed me, it seemed so strange and difficult; but I loved it, spent hours and hours on every lecture and, in the modern idiom, was hooked.
I had one other truly great teacher, who went on to then the top theoreticist of the University of Wisconsin's develop into an even closer friend and long-time associate than did Slichter. That was Max Mason (1877-1961), physics department, and indeed one of the recognized intellectual leaders of the American community.
My five-year undergraduate course gave me a chance to do a substantial amount of normally graduate work before I took my first degree; and the one most influential course I took was electrodynamic theory under Mason.
Mason as a teacher preserved a delicate balance between the vigor, drama, and robustness of Slichter and the
Remember that this was over a half century ago. The joining up had only recently occurred of the compact and powerful analytical formulation of the electromagnetic field theory of the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) with the more modern and truly exciting electron theory of the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928). Mason had an analytical power and dexterity that was as precise, graceful, and effective as was his skill with a billiard cue. His lectures were difficult, demanding, brilliant, and hugely stimulating. He opened up a whole new world for me. When I first walked into his class I unsuspectingly took a turning that profoundly affected all the rest of my life.
precision and erudition of Dresden. His courses were difficult for the better students and must have been a nightmare for a conscientious poor student. He had little respect for the routinely methodical teachers who lectured in so
finished (and dull) a manner that the student took away from the course "a notebook," as he himself once wrote in a letter, "that was almost as good as a two-dollar textbook." His command of formal mathematical technique was powerful and effortless. He could be exquisitely precise, but he could also accomplish imaginative leaps around or over difficulties. He had a great and lasting influence on a large number of graduate students. The mediocre ones found him pretty tough, but the really good ones almost worshipped him.
I think there can be no doubt that Max Mason's greatest talent was his outstanding capacity as a teacher. The warmth of his personality, the delightful play of his humor, the swift and smooth working of his mind—all these were combined in the most effective way both in his formal lectures (which were never formal) and in his very extensive personal work with graduate students. A large number of persons, including some of today's most distinguished North American scientists, look back on their association with Max as, with no possible doubt, the high point of their student life.
He had had the best possible preparation for his teaching. It was Slichter who in undergraduate courses first stimulated Mason's interest in mathematics, and in September 1900 he went to Göttingen, at that time the leading mathematics center of the world, and began the study and research that led to the Ph.D degree, magna cum laude, in May 1903. During the Göttingen days there fully emerged the almost incredible combination of charm, gaiety, versatility, and brilliance that characterized all of his adult life. He loved the student life in Germany, and he could handle even the German language with the same relaxed
dexterity he demonstrated with advanced mathematics.
He wrote his doctoral dissertation under the famous German mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943). This renowned scholar assigned him a thesis problem, and in a short time Mason reported with a complete and elegant solution, his method being so powerful that the entire exposition required only a couple of pages.
Hilbert congratulated him but explained that two pages could not constitute a doctoral dissertation at Göttingen. A new subject was assigned, and, not surprisingly, this one proved to be very difficult. In fact, after Mason had spent several months in an unsuccessful assault, Hilbert suggested changing once again to a new topic. Then one night Mason awoke about 3 A.M. with the whole solution clear in his mind. He got out of bed and wrote steadily for two hours. In the morning, when he examined the compact notes, everything was sound and in order. Hilbert was surprised and highly pleased with the solution, and Mason, as he himself reported the episode, "didn't have the courage to tell him that I had, in fact, dreamed the solution." Mason never had another experience of this sort.
It is my own prejudiced judgment that Max Mason should have continued to be a teacher and a scientist. His public recognition as a research expert would probably have been restricted in large part to those who knew him, for he was almost totally uninterested in publication. In a four-year period at Yale, after taking his degree, he did write a group of eight brilliant papers, on boundary value problems, differential equations, and calculus of variations. But these were the only mathematical papers he published. His mind moved so much faster than his pencil that he found it disagreeable to write down almost anything other than very
fragmentary notes—often so illegible that he himself could not read them after they cooled off. He had, in fact, an almost pathological dislike of writing, and this, combined with his exceedingly high standards and his disdain for what he viewed to be trivial work, is responsible for the fact that his record of publication bears no discernible relation to his capacities or, indeed, to his actual output. Time after time he would produce a brilliant and elegantly compact solution of a problem. All his colleagues who knew about the work would urge him to publish. But this involved the, to him, dull drudgery of writing out something that his mind had left far behind.
During his years at Wisconsin, Mason was viewed as a leading member of the faculty, one of the university's best scholars and most brilliant minds. He was very popular with both faculty and students.
Mason left the University of Wisconsin to become, in October 1925, President of the University of Chicago. He held this position for less than three years, after which he joined the staff on the Rockefeller Foundation, first being in charge of all their work in the natural sciences and then, for six more years, being its president. His name will recur in these pages, since he was a working companion of mine for some sixteen years.
Max was not a great administrator. His mercurial brilliance was such that systematic preparation for meetings and sustained study of proposals submitted to him were simply not congenial to him. When he had an important speech to make, he took a mischievous (and to his colleagues exasperating) pleasure in refusing to prepare for the occasion, preferring to speak extemporaneously. He was a multiply talented man. In fact, I simply do not know any-
thing which, being seriously attempted, he did not do exceedingly well. He was, in his youth, a champion high jumper. He was for a time the unofficial golf champion of Wisconsin. He was an excellent bridge player and a highly skilled billiard player. During all his life Max had a devastating dislike of the superficial and an incredible capacity to penetrate with lightning speed to the significant core of any problem. On one of his trips to Paris he bought what he always referred to as "a hand-painted picture." Part of this picture he disliked, so he bought a kit of oil paints and proceeded, never having had the slightest previous experience, to repaint the unsatisfactory parts. Not only did he proceed, he succeeded very well indeed.
Max did not suffer fools gladly, and he was distinguished for his enemies as well as for his friends. He was brilliantly witty, but on occasion the wit could be caustic. Such superlatives should be used responsibly, so I must make clear that it is the growing judgment reached over many years that places Max's as the most powerful and penetrating mind I have ever known. It has been one of the greatest privileges of my life that for so many years we were working colleagues and ever closer and closer friends.
The civil engineers of those days at Wisconsin had to take a summer field course in surveying, this being given in idyllic surroundings at Devil's Lake, near Baraboo. I took this course the summer of my sophomore year, and during both my third and fourth summers I attended again as a teaching assistant, being responsible for the course in those aspects of observational astronomy that might be useful to a civil engineer-determination of latitude and longitude, of true north, and so on. This was a germinal experience. I discovered that teaching was even more fun than learning. I discovered that, in spite of my contemporary age and my limitations in many directions, I could as a teacher command the interest and respect of my companions. In those days almost anyone interested in science took for granted that he would be a teacher, for full-time research positions were then almost nonexistent; but from that time forward I was headed for teaching not by default, but as an enthusiastic choice.
In the late spring of 1916, prior to the fifth year of the course which led to the professional degree of civil engineer, I applied for a scholarship. It turned out that one of the conditions required the applicant to have a bachelor of science degree. I had left for summer teaching at Devil's Lake before I knew of that requirement, and to this day I am not certain whether the authorities waived the requirement or granted me a B.S. in absentia that June; but in any event I received the scholarship.
The last semester of my five-year course, in the spring of 1917, was upset by the excitement over the war. The actual declaration came on April 6, and on June 5 registration for national service took place. An ardent pacifist in times of peace, I was nevertheless thoroughly determined to get into the thick of World War I. But I was too thin to get into the thick of it. I tried all sorts of inconvenient and unpleasant methods of adding to my weight, including eating more bananas than I like to remember, in preparation for a Navy physical. I simply could not meet the requirements for regular enlistment. It was the spring of 1918 before I managed to get into uniform.
I emerged from the university, as could not have been visible to the eye, a very different person from the still rather moody and shy freshman who entered. I had found something that I could do well, and I had a junior Tau Beta Pi membership to prove it (an honorary fraternity, as I always insist to my Phi Beta Kappa wife, son, and daughter, that really has scholastic standards). I was standing on my own feet. In high school it was faintly disgraceful to get high marks, and it certainly gave one no general standing; but in university this was not the case. I was beginning to have enough confidence to be a little relaxed in my relationships with others. Having no job and no money, I nevertheless began to have some security. I was looking forward eagerly to getting a real job.
These reasons, important as they were, are only a small part of the story of my emergence into a happy life. For something else had happened that was to bring me joy and inspiration in ever-increasing measure all the rest of my life. I fell in love.
I cannot understand persons who write about their lives but do not so much as mention wife and children. To be sure, that is a private sort of subject, which can easily be boring and inappropriate. But it is impossible for me to leave out Mary—or my son and daughter. I will get it over with promptly, and the reader must then realize that they are silently behind any good or happy incident that comes up later.
I had had crushes—innocent and usually of brief duration—previous to meeting Mary Hemenway, as she then was. But from the very first it was overwhelmingly clear was any question in my mind about the future. When Mary we started to "go together," as one then said, in my junior year. There never
graduated and I was staying on for my fifth year, and although we had no admitted understanding about the future, I gave her a set of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a graduating present. She was going to teach school—Latin and History—in a very small town in New Mexico and she needed resources. But that wasn't my idea at all. Clearly the Weaver household of the future ought to have a good edition of the Britannica, and this was a suitable time to acquire it.
Those who know us do not need any written statement to the effect that Mary is at the same time my best friend and my own true love. Others would not be interested, but I have written this down and I will let it stand. Along with all the rest, I am as proud of her as I am of my son and daughter, and I can make no stronger affirmation than that.