4. The First International Congress of Mathematicians, Zurich
4.1 Background and Organisation
4.1.3 The Congress Itself
On the evening before the congress, on Sunday 08 August, the international inviting committee met in order to discuss several administrative matters. However, only eleven members (out of 21) attended this meeting: Geiser, Bleuler, Dumas, Franel, Hirsch, Klein, Mertens, Minkowski, Mittag-Leffler, Rudio and Von der Mühll. Furthermore, Brioschi, Laisant, Vasilyev and Weber attended the meeting upon special invitations [73, p. 13].
The committee discussed and eventually approved the congress programme and the agenda items that had to be presented to the congress participants. This included the regulations on which the congress was to be based and a number of resolutions, which had to be adopted by the participants at one of the general meetings. Geiser had drafted both the regulations and the resolutions. Laisant had devised a very detailed organisation plan and it seems that the committee used some of his suggestions when drafting the regulations. According to the regulations, a congress executive committee was to be elected at the first general meeting, consisting of a president, two general secretaries (one native German speaker and one native French speaker) who were also the official translators, four secretaries (one each for German, French, Italian and English) and eight ordinary members7
. Suitable candidates were nominated at the meeting of the international committee on the Sunday, the choices were confirmed by the congress participants the day after. Not surprisingly, Geiser was elected president and Rudio and Franel became the general secretaries8.
7
Art. 3 of the congress regulations [73, p. 14]
8
The secretaries were Eduard von Weber (German), Émile Borel (French), Vito Volterra (Italian) and James Pierpont (English). The ordinary members were Nikolai Bugaev, Francesco Brioschi, Felix Klein, John Sturgeon Mackay, Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Émile Picard, Henri Poincaré and Heinrich Weber. As Poincaré could not attend the congress, Franz Mertens was elected as a ninth member. Cf. [8n] and [73, p. 30].
The reception committee spent the entire Sunday at the train station, welcoming the mathematicians, ‘many of whom were fortunately also accompanied by their ladies’ [73, p. 22] and issuing the congress cards and vouchers for the banquets and the outings. In addition, each participant also received either French or German copies of the programme, the regulations and the resolutions, as well as an illustrated guidebook of Zurich, published by the official transport committee of the town Zurich.
This was the congress programme [73, p. 17-18]:
Sunday 08 August
-‐ Arrival
-‐ Reception and refreshments in the Tonhalle
Monday 09 August
-‐ First general meeting -‐ Banquet
-‐ Steamboat outing to Rapperswil9
Tuesday 10 August
-‐ Section meetings
Wednesday 11 August
-‐ Second general meeting -‐ Banquet on the Uetliberg10
9Rapperswil in the canton St Gallen is a municipality situated on the northern shore
of Lake Zurich. According to the proceedings it took the congress participants a little more than an hour to get there by steamboat. The boat was to be met by an illuminated gondola parade when approaching Zurich in the evening, but the parade had to be cancelled due to bad weather. However, many official and private buildings on the lakefront were illuminated [73, p. 44].
10
Geiser officially opened the congress at the first general meeting the next morning. The two plenary speakers were Poincaré (his paper was read out by Franel) and Hurwitz. In addition, Rudio spoke Über die Aufgaben und die Organisation der internationalen mathematischen Kongresse11. He presented the
resolutions prepared by the organising committee and gave examples of areas where collaborations between mathematicians of various countries were not only possible but in fact necessary, such as a mathematical bibliography and publishing the complete works of Euler (see section 3.2).
The plenary speakers had been chosen by the organising committee, or, more precisely, by a sub-committee that was formed in February 1897 and comprised Geiser, Hurwitz and Minkowski. Amberg and Franel were assigned to it later on. The task of this sub-committee was choosing the speakers for the general meetings and for the sessions of the individual sections. For the general meetings, they were looking for ‘general talks by men whose names would have a certain ring to them’ [8e]. After some debate and some re-scheduling, the four plenary speakers were Henri Poincaré and Adolf Hurwitz at the first general meeting, as mentioned above, and Giuseppe Peano and Felix Klein at the second meeting. As for the individual sections, Geiser approached a number of mathematicians directly (including all members of the international committee), asking them whether they were interested in giving a talk or whether they could recommend any colleagues. The five sections were:
-‐ Algebra and Number Theory -‐ Analysis and Theory of Functions -‐ Geometry
-‐ Mechanics and Physics -‐ History and Bibliography
11 “
On the Duties and the Organisation of the International Mathematical Congresses”; cf. appendix E.1.5.
A total of 24 talks were given in the sessions of these sections. Comparing this to the 21 plenary lectures and the approximately 180 invited talks in 19 different sections scheduled for the next ICM in Seoul in 2014 [86], one can see that the ICMs have come a long way since the very first one in Zurich. Incidentally, the original intention was not to count the Zurich congress at all, but to regard it as a trial congress and then count the Paris congress in 1900 as the first proper one. However, partly due to the great success of the Zurich congress it is regarded as the first ICM12.
Admittedly, the organisers of the ICM in Seoul can expect several thousand participants. The Zurich congress had 242 participants in total, of which 38 were ladies. Most of these ladies were the wives of the participating mathematicians, or their daughters. Geiser for example was accompanied by his wife Emma and two of his daughters, Charlotte and Hedwig [73, p. 68]. Rudio’s wife Maria attended, too, as did a ‘Miss Elisabeth Rudio’ from Wiesbaden – maybe an unmarried sister or aunt who came to visit [73, p. 74]. Only four female mathematicians attended the congress13, which is not
surprising given that the congress was held at the end of the 19th century.
However, the congress organisers advanced a more modern view on female students than many of their international colleagues. Charlotte Angas Scott wrote to Wilhelm Fiedler in 1897, asking him ‘whether ladies will be welcome – as mathematicians, of course?’ [17]. Boesch Trüeb notes that Fiedler, who neither organised nor attended the congress, could give her a positive answer, and suggests that this was due to the fact that women had been allowed to study in Zurich for several decades already14 [ibid.].
12
However, with the exception of the first few, ICMs have not been numbered due to the controversy surrounding exclusion policy at the 1920 and 1924 ICMs, which barred mathematicians from the former Central Powers in WWI from attending these ICMs [27, p. 19-21].
13They were Iginia Massarini (Rome), Vera von Schiff (St Petersburg), Charlotte
Angas Scott (Bryn Mawr), and Charlotte Wedell (Göttingen). However, none of them gave a talk – in fact, the first woman to give a talk at an ICM was H P Hudson in Cambridge in 1912 [26, p. 52].
14
The University of Zurich first admitted female students in the 1860s; it was the first state-accredited university in the world to award a degree to a woman (in 1867 – in contrast, women were given the right to vote on a national level only in 1971!). Most higher education institutions in Switzerland followed suit, but numbers remained
The time of the congress also explains the fact that the vast majority of the attendants were European. At the time, the major centres of mathematical research were at European universities, two prominent examples being Paris and Göttingen. Sixteen countries were represented at the ICM, with Switzerland, Germany, France and Italy accounting for roughly two thirds of the male participants. Whilst the organising committee coordinated the date of the congress with meetings of German and French scientific societies, it could not consider every country. In the same year there was a congress in Kiev that most Russian mathematicians would have attended [8l]. Furthermore, the British Association of Mathematicians had a meeting in Canada [ibid.], which might explain the surprisingly low number of British participants15
.
Most of the male attendants were mathematicians and mathematical physicists who held lectureships or professorships at university, but the list of participants also includes a relatively large number of secondary school teachers, as well as a few publishers and representatives of various Swiss authorities.
Although the number of participants at ICMs (and hence the number of talks), and the number of countries represented by said participants have increased considerably since 1897, the regulations on which the congresses are based have not changed all that much since then. Of course, they have been edited and amended over the decades, in particular as the congresses are now organised under the auspices of the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The IMU’s Guidelines are more detailed than the regulations on which the Zurich congress was based; the committees now have to consider gender balance and an appropriate distribution of countries, in particular developing countries, when inviting speakers, etc. But the essence of those guidelines is
low for several decades, particularly at such a technology-oriented institution as the Polytechnic (where the most popular subject for women was pharmaceutics). Furthermore, most female students were foreigners – but then girls at state schools in Zurich were only allowed to take their Matura exams from about 1900 onwards [39, p. 114-118].
15
The three British attendants were the Cambridge lecturers Ernest William Hobson and Joseph Larmor, and the schoolteacher John Sturgeon Mackay from Edinburgh.
still the same as that of the 1897 regulations: that the congresses should provide mathematicians from all over the world with an opportunity to get to know each other and to discuss mathematical questions, regardless of their nationalities [cf. 47]. So, with the exception of part d), one could say that the first article of the regulations of 1897 is still valid today:
Art. 1
The congress has the purpose of:
a) Furthering the personal relations between the mathematicians of various countries;
b) Providing […] an overview over the current state of the various fields of mathematical sciences and their applications, as well as the treatment of individual problems of particular importance;
c) [Discussing] the tasks and the organisation of future international congresses;
d) Preparing a solution for problems on bibliography, terminology etc., which require international cooperation.
[73, p. 14]
Another part of the regulations which is of particular interest is the following, as it highlights both the international nature of the congress and the fact that the host country was Switzerland [ibid.]:
Art. 4
The official publications of the congress are to be in German and French. In the main meetings and the sessions of the individual sections, votes and talks in Italian or English are permitted as well.
Despite the second part of the article, German and French were predominant. Two talks were given in Italian, and one talk was scheduled in
English16. However, due to popular demand and the fact that hardly any
native English speakers attended the congress that talk was given in German [73, p. 45]. Given the tense political situation between Germany and France the all-round bilingualism of the congress was probably a very wise choice. The organising committee saw to a fair distribution of languages with regard to the talks and ensured that German and French versions of every printed matter relating to the congress were available. Of course, this came very naturally to the Swiss: their country was multilingual, as was the committee itself.
As mentioned above, the organising committee was keen to plan the social programme of the congress. On 31 January 1897, a slightly disgruntled Minkowski wrote in a letter to David Hilbert [33, p. 3]:
The schedules for the outings etc. at the congress have already been drafted; here too the scientific part comes last again.
Of course, the committee had to start work somewhere, and without a doubt they felt very honoured that Switzerland had been chosen as the first host country. Offering the participants a range of opportunities to explore Zurich and its surroundings probably also helped to get funding from cantonal and federal governments, as it was a chance to promote the ‘tourist region Switzerland’ [80]. But the minutes of the committee meetings and the speeches given at the congress itself suggest that the social aspect was prioritised, and that the mathematical part was almost thought of as taking care of itself. This is nicely illustrated by Hurwitz’s welcoming speech at the reception on 08 August: Rather than talking about mathematical collaborations and mathematics in general, he emphasised the social side of the congress, stressing the ‘hermitic’ [73, p. 23] mathematician’s need to talk to colleagues. Apart from having the opportunity to discuss scientific problems, he hoped that the congress participants would ‘enjoy the cheerful and informal company of [their] peers, enhanced by the knowledge that representatives of
16
On Pasigraphy, its Present State and the Pasigraphic Movement in Italy by Ernst Schröder from Karlsruhe
various nations feel connected in peace and friendship by the most ideal interests’ [ibid.; cf. appendix E.1.2]. Hurwitz considered these “most ideal interests” to be the search for knowledge and scientific truth, rather than political or economic interests. Westermann suggests that the conference attendees ‘presented and affirmed a certain image of a mathematician and scholar to one another’ [80].
Similarly, Rudio claimed in his talk on 09 August that ‘international congresses of mathematicians would have a right to exist even if their only purpose was to bring mathematicians of all countries of the Earth closer together’ [73, p. 32-33]. The importance of personal relations was stressed in practically every speech given at the congress. Mathematicians were distinguished from one another only by their mathematical preferences but not by their nationalities. Both the congress proceedings (including the speeches) and the organising committee’s minutes imply subtly that one of the objectives of the congress was to overcome, or to attempt to overcome, animosities between French and German mathematicians. Although mathematical collaborations were discussed, e.g. publishing Euler’s works, the predominant opinion at the time seemed to be that real mathematical progress could only be achieved by individuals. Geiser nicely explains this in his opening speech: ‘Surely none of us will believe that in future the solution of great problems in science will be the result of such meetings’ [73, p. 27]. But despite (or possibly because of) the solitary nature of mathematical research, great value was attached to exchanging ideas and establishing friendships with other mathematicians. As the European countries became more and more imperialistic and also nationalistic towards the end of the 19th
century, this was all the more important. Klein summed up his feelings in his plenary lecture [73, p. 300]:
The mathematical congress is drawing to a close. Although it is too early to discuss its results, we may express a sensation that dominates each and every one of us. I am talking about the overwhelming impression of the variety of mathematical views and interests, which greatly hinders communication [between mathematicians]. The
diversity of languages almost pales in comparison to the diversity of mathematical mindsets.
And yet we all feel the desire for communication equally strongly. There is no better proof of this than the number of peers who have gathered for this first international congress. We will try to consider our science as a great entity, as a harmony; not just for the sake of philosophical knowledge, but also from a practical point of view: we have to defend and often regain the importance of our science.
However, despite this appeal to unity, Klein was also very quick to secure the 1904 ICM for Germany after France had been approved to host the 1900 congress. It was not so easy to distinguish mathematics from politics after all: ‘In the cause of the universality of scientific knowledge, the mathematicians worked on an international standardisation of their terminology, and stressed the national research contributions at the same time’ [80].
In a nutshell, it can be said that the first international congress of mathematicians was a success. It paved the way for future congresses, and the fact that the ICMs are not only still held today, but have increased significantly in size, importance and popularity since 1897 is a tribute to the work of the organising committee. Geiser could not have foreseen such a development, he could only have hoped for it when he bid farewell to the congress participants at the second general meeting on 11 August 1897 [73, p. 60]:
And if, at the end of this lovely day, I call out a cordial farewell to you all on behalf of my colleagues in Zurich, then I may also assume to speak in accordance with the kind invitation of our peers from France when I add:
Auf Wiedersehen in Paris – See you in Paris!