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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Transforming Tradition: Richard Courant in Göttingen

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Richard Courant had a knack for being at the right place at the right time. He came to Gottingen in 1907, just when Hilbert and Minkowski were delving into fast-breaking developments in electron theory. There he joined three other students who also came from Breslau: Otto Toeplitz, Ernst Hellinger, and Max Born, all three, like him, from a German Jewish background. Toeplitz was their natural intellectual leader, in part because his father was an Oberlehrer at the Breslau Gymnasium (Muller-Stach 2014). Courant was five or six years younger than the others; he was sociable and ambitious, but also far poorer than they (Reid 1976, 8–13).