Mathwar/Personlist/Courant Richard
Richard Courant
(* January 8th 1888 in Lublinitz, † January 27th 1972 in New Rochelle, USA)
Life
When war broke out Courant was drafted into the army. Before he saw action he became seriously ill with typhoid fever. He returned to his unit and was involved in fighting which saw half his fellow soldiers killed. He made a suggestion about designing a telegraph system which used the earth as a conductor and he was allowed to return to Göttingen to discuss the idea. At Göttingen his idea was put into practice and a box to transmit signals produced. Courant returned to his unit with his communications box.
On the 27 September 1915 Courant was wounded and received leave. Soon after he was divorced from Nelly Neumann. Although Courant returned to the front it is probably no exaggeration to say that his piece of communications equipment saved his life, for Courant spent time training men to use it and avoided the worst of the fighting. Courant found time to carry on with his mathematics research too. When Springer started the new journal Mathematische Zeitschrift in January 1918, one of Courant's papers, written while he was in the army, appeared in the second issue.
After the war, in December 1918, Courant returned to Göttingen. He married Nerina Runge, Carle Runge's daughter, on 22 January 1919 and a couple of months later began teaching as a privatdozent at Göttingen. This was a period of intense research activity for Courant. In the spring of 1920 he accepted the chair of mathematics at Münster when Killing retired. However, after a few months Hilbert and Klein arranged for him to return to Göttingen to replace Hecke who had done to Hamburg.
Courant was expelled from Göttingen when the Nazis came to power in 1933. On 30 January 1933 Hitler came to power and in March Courant left Göttingen for his spring holiday in Arosa in Switzerland. He had been hoping not only to have a holiday, but to complete the second volume of Courant-Hilbert when away from his duties in the Mathematics Institute. Friedrichs was with Courant to help with the book. Political events destroyed his plans, however, and he returned to Göttingen at the beginning of April on advice from members of the Institute. On 7 April 1933 the Civil Service Law provided the means of removing Jewish teachers from the universities, and of course also to remove those of Jewish descent from other roles. All civil servants who were not of Aryan descent (having one grandparent of the Jewish religion made someone non-Aryan) were to be retired. However, there was an exemption clause which exempted non-Aryans who had fought for Germany in World War I. Certainly Courant came under the exemption clause and he expected to be unaffected.
On 5 May Courant received an official letter telling him he was on forced leave. Weyl was made director of the Mathematics Institute and he made every effort to have Courant reinstated. Meanwhile attempts were made to offer Courant posts elsewhere. He was offered a position in Istanbul, he considered it enough to make a trip there, but eventually turned it down. Invited to Cambridge in England for a one year visit, he applied for leave (slightly strange that he had to do so since he was already on forced leave). His forced leave was changed to ordinary leave and Courant left for England, going to New York University the following year.