Turing's Cathedral Page 4
In 1683 a settler named Henry Greenland opened a tavern near the midpoint of the wagon road, and around this nucleus a village began to form. The proprietors of East and West New Jersey met at Greenland’s Tavern in 1683 to decide their common boundary, and this put Prince-Town on the map, while the nearby wilderness attracted a small group of Quakers seeking to distance themselves as far as possible from the secular influences of Philadelphia and New York. Halfway between the Raritan and the Delaware, and just to the south of the overland trail, was a small stream named Wapowog by the Lenape, flowing through land that was taken up in 1693, as his share of the original grant to the proprietors of West New Jersey, by William Penn. Six close-knit Quaker families, with Penn as an absentee partner, founded a colony here in 1696, and named it Stony Brook. Instead of a tavern, they built a Quaker meetinghouse.
The patriarchs of these families were Benjamin Clarke, William Olden, Joseph Worth, John Hornor, Richard Stockton, and Benjamin FitzRandolph, with Stockton becoming the largest landowner thanks to 5,500 acres purchased for £900 in 1701 from William Penn (who reserved 1,050 acres “as to said William Penn shall seem meet and convenient” for himself).9 Benjamin Clarke purchased 1,200 acres between Stony Brook, the Province Line, the present Stockton Street, and the present Springdale Road, in 1696, conveying 400 acres (including the future site of the Institute for Advanced Study) to his brother-in-law William Olden and deeding 9.6 acres in trust for the Friends meetinghouse and cemetery in 1709. The meetinghouse was finished in 1726, and the settlers also opened a school and built water-driven mills. By 1737 a stage wagon was running between Trenton and New Brunswick twice a week, and Prince-Town had grown to accommodate those who stopped to change horses or spend the night.
With no institution of higher learning between Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, and the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, a College of New Jersey was established (by Presbyterians) in 1746, holding classes first in Elizabeth, and then in Newark, before being deeded 10 acres of cleared land and 200 acres of woodland by the Quaker community in Princeton in January 1753. The first students arrived in 1756, and, in January 1774, with revolution brewing, they demonstrated their support for the cause of independence by burning the steward’s winter store of tea.
When war arrived in Princeton at the end of November 1776, the American side was in disarray, with George Washington’s exhausted forces in retreat back to Pennsylvania after a series of defeats that included Brooklyn Heights (on Long Island), White Plains, and Fort Washington (on Manhattan Island in New York).
General Washington and some three thousand men arrived in Princeton on the night of December 1, pursued by Lord Cornwallis’s forces and their retinue of Hessian conscripts, who were looting and pillaging along the way. Washington regrouped in Princeton for a week before retreating to Trenton and finally to safety across the Delaware, while the British gathered at Trenton in pursuit.
On Christmas Eve, Washington slipped back across the Delaware (with 2,400 men) and launched a surprise attack in a snowstorm at eight o’clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth. He then returned to Pennsylvania, replenishing his forces as best he could until New Year’s Day, when, with some 5,000 men (more than half of them irregulars), he reassembled at Trenton, preparing to meet Cornwallis’s forces, who were on the advance from Princeton. This led to an inconclusive standoff along the banks of the Assunpink Creek. The night of the second was bitterly cold, freezing the muddy roads and allowing Washington’s army, with their artillery, to escape under cover of darkness along the back roads toward Stony Brook.
Sunrise of January 3 found the main column of the American Army near the Friends meetinghouse, marching toward the village of Princeton over a route that skirted the shallow ditch between Olden Farm and the banks of Stony Brook, passing across what is now the open field behind the Institute for Advanced Study and then veering right toward the village of Princeton through what is now the Springdale Golf Club and was then Stockton’s farm. The route passed over a low patch of ground that, 170 years later, would become the site of the Electronic Computer Project building at the end of Olden Lane, and this is where the main column was when the Battle of Princeton began.
Washington had dispatched his close friend General Hugh Mercer and about 350 men to backtrack up Stony Brook along Quaker Road and destroy the bridge at Worth’s Mills (where Route 206 crosses the brook today). Mercer’s party, however, was discovered by British forces heading from Princeton to Trenton to join the expected battle there, and a brief, intense engagement ensued that left about 50 Americans dead and 150 wounded (against 24 dead, 58 wounded, and 194 prisoners on the British side). General Mercer, surrounded, refused to surrender and, mistaken for General Washington, was bayoneted and left for dead. Washington, with reinforcements, rallied the survivors, drove the British from the field, and stormed their headquarters in the college’s Nassau Hall, while those British not taken prisoner retreated toward New Brunswick through the hills. Mercer regained consciousness and survived for nine days in the Clarke farmhouse, converted to a field hospital, close to where he fell. A physician by profession, he realized that although his head injuries were survivable, his abdominal wounds were not. But the tide of war had turned. Enlistments swelled Washington’s forces, the insurgency gained popular support, and the British left New Jersey for New York.
Olden Farm, after a brief role in the first American revolution, would remain undisturbed until the mathematicians arrived and began working on the next.
THREE
Veblen’s Circle
What could be wiser than to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it?
—Walter W. Stewart to Abraham Flexner, 1939
ON MAY 2, 1847, newlyweds Thomas and Kari Veblen, who spoke barely a word of English, left their home in the landlocked Valdres district of Norway to emigrate to America, leaving behind a severe economic depression and the body of their infant son. The voyage took nineteen weeks, with a shipboard fever costing Thomas his health, and all passengers under the age of six their lives. With Wisconsin on the verge of statehood, the Veblens arrived in Milwaukee on September 16, and after Kari nursed her husband back to health, Thomas, a cabinetmaker, built a house in the village of Port Ulao, in Ozaukee County, on Lake Michigan’s western shore. In September 1848, Andrew Anders Veblen, the first of their eleven American children, was born. While the nine children who survived their pioneer existence were growing up, the Veblens moved three more times: first to Sheboygan County in 1849, then to Manitowoc County in 1854, and finally to Rice County, Minnesota, in 1864. At every move, Thomas Veblen built his own house, including outbuildings and barns, and cleared his own land.
The Veblen children worked long hours on the farm. Kari’s father, Thorstein Bunde, had lost the family property in Norway to the machinations of unscrupulous lawyers and had died under the burdens that followed, when Kari was five. Determined to secure a better future in America, the Veblens sent all their children to college, including their four daughters and two subsequently distinguished sons. Andrew Veblen became a professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Iowa, while Thorstein Veblen, born in 1857, became an influential social theorist, best known for coining the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 masterpiece The Theory of the Leisure Class.
Thorstein Veblen had a Darwinian eye, sharpened by growing up on the edge of the wilderness, for the coevolution of corporations, financial instruments, and machines. Although respected as an economist, he struggled financially for much of his life, and his only significant personal investments, in the California raisin business, failed. In 1888 and 1889 he retreated to his wife’s farm in Stacyville, Iowa, and translated the eleventh-century Norse epic Laxdœla Saga (“an ethnological document of a high order”) into English, but failed to find a publisher until 1925.
In a string of books—including The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the
Industrial Arts (1914), An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (1917), The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918), The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919), and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (1923)—Thorstein applied evolutionary economics, a field he pioneered, to the problems of society looming large at the time. He helped found the New School of Social Research, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Technocracy movement. His books were widely read, but his warnings widely disregarded, and he died, discouraged, in Menlo Park, California, on the eve of the Great Depression, in 1929. “He heard members of his family, long since dead, speak to him in Norwegian,” a neighbor noted near the end.1
Oswald Veblen, Thorstein’s nephew and the first of Andrew Veblen’s eight children, attended public schools in Iowa City, followed by the University of Iowa, where he was awarded one prize in sharpshooting and another prize in math. He took time off from his studies to travel down the Iowa and Mississippi rivers in the style of Huckleberry Finn, and remained an avid outdoorsman until the day he died. He was tall, lithe, and always looked like he had just come in from the woods. “I don’t ever remember seeing him in anything that looked new,” says Herman Goldstine. Albert Tucker adds that “he always had a fourth button on his coat because he was so tall and slim.” An attachment to the soil ran deep in his Norwegian blood. “He is a most excellent person,” warned Abraham Flexner, the Institute for Advanced Study’s first director, “but the word ‘building’ or ‘farm’ has an intoxicating effect upon him.”2
After obtaining a degree in mathematics at age eighteen in 1898, Oswald Veblen stayed on as a teaching assistant in physics for one year and then left for Harvard, earning a second BA in 1900, before heading to the University of Chicago (where Thorstein was an assistant professor of political science) for his PhD. His thesis, on the foundations of geometry, led to his recruitment by Princeton University in 1905, during a period of expansion after Woodrow Wilson, the future president of the United States, was appointed president of the university in 1902.
The College of New Jersey had been renamed Princeton University in 1896, with ambitions to expand into graduate education and scientific research. Wilson, the first president of the college who was not a clergyman, began by hiring “preceptors”—junior faculty expected to work closely with undergraduates—and encouraged faculty research. While Princeton remained off-limits to black students (until the U.S. Navy’s V-12 program broke the barrier in 1942) and women (until 1969), Wilson did appoint the first Catholic and the first Jew to the faculty. The number of Jewish students reached twenty-three in the class of 1925.
Wilson left the university to become governor of New Jersey in 1911 and president of the United States in 1913. War was declared against Germany in April of 1917, at the beginning of his second term. Some 138 of Princeton’s faculty joined the armed services before the war came to an end, with Veblen among the first round of volunteers. Commissioned as a captain in the Army Reserve, and later promoted to major, he was assigned to the Army Ordnance Department’s Office of Ballistic Research in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, just in advance of its transfer to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, a thirty-five-thousand-acre military reservation on the shores of Chesapeake Bay.
The Aberdeen of 1918, its makeshift roads a sea of mud, was a precursor to the Los Alamos of 1943. Its mission was to enlist American science and industry against the German war machine, but by the time the Proving Ground was operational, the war in Europe was drawing to a close. According to Thorstein Veblen, the United States had entered the war, belatedly, only to ensure that the transnational interests of the industrialists would be protected against any social upheavals that peace in Europe might unleash. Oswald Veblen, a sharpshooter at heart, had no doubts about how to help, and improving the accuracy of guns raised none of the moral questions that would later be raised by the development of atomic bombs. After completing basic training, according to Herman Goldstine, Veblen kept busy at Sandy Hook, in advance of the move to Aberdeen, by “leaning out of an airplane dropping bombs from his hands trying to see how this whole bombing thing would go.”3
A stalemate in the trenches, the Great War became a battle for bigger and better guns. Artillery fire caused some three-quarters of all casualties, with aircraft and bombs remaining on the sidelines until World War II. The United States entered the war with horse-drawn artillery and fired the last shot from a 155-mm howitzer nicknamed “Calamity Jane.” New, long-range artillery and shells were being rushed into production and delivered to Aberdeen to be tested before being shipped overseas to the American Expeditionary Force.
The first test round was fired, in the midst of the worst winter on record, on January 2, 1918. Veblen arrived on January 4. With the same ease with which Oppenheimer would later assume command at Los Alamos, he rose to the occasion, assuming command of the entire ballistics group at Aberdeen. As the eldest of eight children, he found that leadership came naturally, while his willingness to shoulder his share of physical hardship on the firing ranges won the loyalty of his men.
“Veblen’s tremendous influence was almost imperceptible at the time it was happening,” explained his Princeton colleague Albert Tucker. “He had a rather hesitant way of speaking, very tentative and diffident,” adds fellow topologist Deane Montgomery, “but he really was an extremely forceful man.” To Klára (Klári) von Neumann he was “a tall, gaunt man, sporting a shyness which made him stutter in his speech, yet a formidable opponent when anybody crossed his path.” Herman Goldstine, who credits Veblen for von Neumann’s being allowed to build his computer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, remembers him as “the kind of guy who would keep dripping water on the stone until finally it eroded.”4
Since the time of Archimedes and his siege engines, military commanders had brought in the mathematicians when they needed help. The problem facing Veblen was as old as gunnery itself: If you aim a gun in a given direction, and load it with a given shell, where will the shell land? Or, if you want to hit a given target with a given shell, where should the gun be aimed? According to Newton and Galileo, the path of a projectile was calculable, but in practice it was difficult to predict the behavior of a shell in flight.
With the introduction of breech-loading, rifled artillery, accuracy improved to where it became possible to test-fire a gun a fixed number of times, distributing the shots across a range of distances, and then use a mathematical model to fill in a complete firing table (or range table) from there. Range, speed, and altitude had increased to where the flight of the shell was affected by factors ranging from the changing density of the atmosphere to the rotation of the earth. Preparing the range tables required enormous numbers of calculations, largely performed by hand. The gap between what the models predicted and where the shells landed was narrowed, as far as possible, by the ballistic coefficient, an empirically derived constant that was rarely as constant as it should have been, and “was made to carry a very heavy burden,” in the words of Veblen’s colleague Forest Ray Moulton.5
Veblen organized the teams of human computers who were placed under his command, introducing mimeographed computing sheets that formalized the execution of step-by-step algorithms for processing the results of the firing range tests. It took the entire month of February to fire the first forty shots, yet by May his group was firing forty shots each day, and the growing force of human computers was keeping up. Veblen recruited widely, with a knack for discovering future mathematicians and making the best use of their talents during the war.
One of his recruits was Norbert Wiener, a twenty-four-year-old mathematical prodigy well trained after two years of postdoctoral study in Europe, but socially awkward and discouraged by the failures of his first teaching job. Even the army had rejected him, for poor eyesight and an inability to fire a rifle or maintain control of a horse. When Veblen located Wiener, he was living in Albany, Ne
w York, and writing articles for the Encyclopedia Americana to scrape by. “I received an urgent telegram from Professor Oswald Veblen at the new Proving Ground at Aberdeen, Maryland,” Wiener later recalled. “This was my chance to do real war work … I took the next train to New York, where I changed for Aberdeen.”
Wiener was transformed by the Proving Ground. “We lived in a queer sort of environment, where office rank, army rank, and academic rank all played a role, and a lieutenant might address a private under him as ‘Doctor,’ or take orders from a sergeant,” he wrote. “When we were not working on the noisy hand-computing machines which we knew as ‘crashers,’ we were playing bridge together after hours using the same computing machines to record our scores. We went swimming together in the tepid, brackish waters of Chesapeake Bay, or took walks in the woods.”
“Whatever we did, we always talked mathematics,” Wiener explained. “Much of our talk led to no immediate research.” Wiener found that the Proving Ground “furnished a certain equivalent to that cloistered but enthusiastic intellectual life which I had previously experienced at the English Cambridge, but at no American university.” Veblen had gathered a community that would redefine American mathematics in the years between World War I and World War II. “For many years after the First World War,” wrote Wiener, “the overwhelming majority of significant American mathematicians was to be found among those who had gone through the discipline of the Proving Ground. Thus the public became aware for the first time that we mathematicians had a function to perform in the world.”6