A-Z Challenge 08: Helmholtz, Hilbert and Hörmander

Last summer, older boy and his buddies took our old Toyota and drove down to the French Alps, to ski on a glacier for three weeks. On the way back home, the transmission broke down on the autobahn somewhere in the former East Germany. Because the car was old, it took some time to get a new transmission and replace it.

So the boys took a plane back to the north. Two weeks later, my wife and I went down to Germany, to pick up the car and drive it back home.

Driving for hours and hours on the autobahn is boring. To entertain ourselves, I lectured my wife on the life and achievements of great mathematicians who lived and worked in the various cities we passed by:

Gustav Helmholtz (1821-1894) was a mathematician and physicist. He made important contributions to wave theory (Helmholtz equation) and thermodynamics (Helmholtz free energy), and had his last professor chair at the University of Berlin.

David Hilbert (1862-1943) worked most of his life in the University of Göttingen. He is famous for his contributions to axiomatic geometry and functional analysis (Hilbert space).

Lars Hörmander (1931-2012) was a professor at the University of Lund. He made important contributions to the theory of pseudo-differential operators, and is famous for his four-volume book on linear partial differential operators.

It might be that my wife found my lectures somewhat nerdy and tedious. At least, she wasn’t able to keep track of the details. Last night I went to a bar downtown to drink a beer with a math professor from the University Lund.

“Lund, that’s where Hilbert worked,” my wife said.

“No, Hilbert was in Göttingen, ” I replied. “Hörmander was in Lund.”

After all, my wife is just a chemical engineer. They make useful contributions to society too, but they just can’t keep track of the mathematics and the mathematicians >:)