October 09, 2016 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Flexner’s Preposterous Dream is realized
Even most Americans who shop today in those huge sprawling malls
of Macy’s have very little idea about its history.
Little do they know that in June of 1929, R.H. Macy and Co.
purchased the Bamberger’s departmental store chain based in Newark, New Jersey
ushering in a windfall for its owners both Louis Bamberger and his sister
Caroline Bamberger Fuld.
Louis Bamberger was the product of German Jewish immigrants and a
very shy man who never married.
He avoided speaking in public whenever he could.
His sister Caroline married twice, outliving both her husbands yet
never producing any children.
This is ultimate I think!
To possess fabulous wealth without any offspring thus not adding
any further misery into this wretched planet teeming with human apes.
It was the absolute luck and the timing that did it.
Louis bought a failing store in 1892 in Newark and turned it into
a mammoth 14-storey building and a huge success.
Just months before the fatal Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the
beginning of the 10-year old Great Depression when there the wave of maniacal
economic euphoria and market boom frenzy was reaching its zenith, Louis Bamberger sold his Bamberger’s
chain.
It was a classical case of selling of the right time by pure chance of course.
It was a classical case of selling of the right time by pure chance of course.
I do not have the figures of the windfall but it so much that he
could afford to distribute 1 million USD then among his 240 employees.
It was from the proceeds of this propitious sale that their
representatives approached Abraham Flexner.
Thus, thanks to the combination of endowment from the Bamberger
childless siblings (Bless them for not reproducing) and preposterous
educational dreams of Abraham Flexner and Oswald Veblen at Princeton
University, the Institute for Advanced Study came into being.
Flexner and Veblen set in motion their search to bring in the best
mathematicians and physicists under this shelter.
They did not have to look hard as Hitler and fascism in Europe was
handing them over for free.
Einstein was Flexner’s first coup de maitre followed by the
logician Kurt Gödel and that poymath genius John von Neumann.
Soon they were joined by the German mathematician Hermann Weyl.
By 1933, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton had replaced
Gottingen in Germany to become a mathematician’s paradise and possible the
turning point when the center for education in general had shifted from Europe
to the United States.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average
storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and teacher that I
am aware of is Professor Subhashish in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, he actually does
and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian
students at the International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All
his books can be downloaded for free through this link.
For
entertainment may I suggest Kids Songs channel.
The Bamberger Endowment thanks to their selling of their store in the nick of time
October 24, 1929 Black Thursday
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