Göttingen

He was born on the 14th of September, 1769, and is therefore now in his 80th year.

After going through the ordinary course of education at Göttingen, and having made a rapid tour through Holland, England, and France, he became a pupil of Werner at the Mining School of Freiburg, and in his 21st year published an essay on the basalts of the Rhine.

though he soon became officially connected with the mining corps he was enabled to continue his excursions in foreign countries for during the six or seven years succeeding the publication of his first essay he seems to have visited austria switzerland italy and france his attention to mining did not however prevent him from devoting his attention to other scientific pursuits among which botany and the then recent discovery of galvanism may be especially noticed botany indeed we know from his own authority occupied him almost exclusively for some years but even at this time he was practising the use of those astronomical and physical instruments which he afterwards turned to so singularly excellent an account the political disturbances of the civilized world at the close of the last century prevented our author from carrying out various plans of foreign travel which he had contemplated and detained him an unwilling prisoner in europe in the year seventeen ninety nine he went to spain with the hope of entering africa from cadiz but the unexpected patronage which he received at the court of madrid led to a greater alteration in his plans and decided him to proceed directly to the spanish possessions in america and there gratify the longings for foreign adventure and the scenery of the tropics which had haunted him from boyhood but had all along been turned in the diametrically opposite direction of asia After encountering various risks of capture, he succeeded in reaching America, and from 1799 to 1804 prosecuted there extensive researches in the physical geography of the New World, which have indelibly stamped his name in the undying records of science.

Accepting an excursion to Naples with Gailusac and Van Boeck in 1805, the year after his return from America, the succeeding twenty years of his life were spent in paris and were almost exclusively employed in editing the results of his american journey in order to bring these results before the world in a manner worthy of their importance he commenced a series of gigantic publications in almost every branch of science on which he had instituted observations in eighteen seventeen after twelve years of incessant toil four fifths were completed and an ordinary copy of the part then in print cost considerably more than 100 pounds sterling.

He was the son-in-law of Madame Curie.

um he reproduced han's experiments meticulously um and he and his team they were confirmed uh like like it was confirmed that like han was you know what what he what he had stated to have proven um as regards among other things the existence and neutrons during the process and uranium fission and their situation like that that it was it was signed off on is yes this is legitimate um no no letter to nature magazine um which in those days was was like a leading kind of like it was a combination like kind of like pop science stuff but also like major scientific discoveries that's where they would be featured in which admittedly sounds weird today but i mean that's the way things were you know it's um um this french team led by jaloit um their letter was titled quote liberation of neutrons and the nuclear explosion of uranium um and uh essentially that was sort of like the first kind of like public declaration of uh you know nuclear fission having like tremendous weapons potential Um, but I emphasize potential, you know, it, there was nothing, there, there was nothing demonstrably proven here, but, uh, the, uh, what this led to was, um, in the next few days in, uh, Gottingen, which is a renowned university town, or at least it was then in Germany at, uh, the physics colloquium, uh, a guy named, uh, Wilhelm Han, Hanley, who was, uh, he didn't know, um, Han, but he was like a protege of him because like, you know, he was an up and coming physicist, you know, everybody, you know, he was kind of the, he was kind of like the grand old man that everybody looked to.

He read a short paper, um, on, uh, what do you call the uranium burning engine? I mean, we're talking about as a nuclear reactor.

Okay.

Um, I'm not even like an educated layman in physics.

Okay.

I'm the first to admit that, but, um, to, uh, the kind of highlight of the event, if you want to look at it in those terms, two Gottingen professors, uh, got him juice.

And again, even Hanley, they did, They outlined once again, not them once again, but they outlined again, as was on the mind of every man present, you know, the practical ability of a, quote, uranium burner.

But...

Then his second semester abroad, he goes to the University of Göttingen and he worked with a guy named Dr. Nernst.

He did.

Put that in your satchel because that's where the paths cross and I'm not talking about it.

So he starts out at the University of Leipzig.

Then he bops over to Heidelberg as an instructor.

But in 1890, he begins his 15-year career, like his 15-year span of time at the University of Göttingen.

where he will do lots of very important science things and whatever.

That behavior is called diffraction, and only waves do it.

A graduate student at Göttingen named Walter Elsasser was the first to suggest such an experiment.

Fire electrons into a crystal and look for the same spots that X-rays produce.

The two men who got there first experimentally though had actually been pursuing something else.

His old teacher had just died.

And Riemann took over his chair at Göttingen, the chair that had once been Gauss's.

He was living in rooms in Gauss's old observatory.

And that August, the Berlin Academy of Sciences made him a member.

The day before he died, he was still working, under a fig tree, full of joy at the view of the lake.

And at the very end, he sent his love to the people at home and told his wife, kiss our child.

66 years later, in 1932, Carl Ludwig Ziegel went through Riemann's surviving notes in Göttingen and found pages of calculations.

Riemann had worked out the first zero by hand, 14.13, and a sum over all the zeros, correct to 20 decimal places.

Some of them are genuine stops in the brothers' lives.

Hanau, Steinau, where they spent their childhood, Marburg, Kassel, Göttingen.

None of this is invented.

Others are places that have been linked to a specific tale.