A Work of High Beauty--an Architecture of Thought, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

I don't often have a chance to purchase manuscripts by significant scientists in their edited state, back from the journal to which they were being submitted.  This is the case with the material below, a paper written by Dr. Hans J. Reissner in 1944. It is a remarkable thing to look at, a precise and elegant archaeology of thinking, a sort of synesthesic display of thinking on different levels.  It is a beautiful thing:

[Hans J. Reissner (1874-1967) was a leading German pioneer in aeronautics and aeronautical engineering and mathematical physics. He was appointed to the chair vacated by Arnold Sommerfeld at the Technische Hochschul at Aachen, where he established the aerodynamics laboratory and designed the great experimental wind tunnel at Aachen where he was the second director (after T. von Karman). He went on to the University of Berlin where he remained until 1938, when he left Germany for the United States. Reissner held a chair at the Illinois Institute of Technology and in 1944 joined the faculty at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.  Van Karman spoke very highly of Reissner and attributed his work in aerodynamics to be as important as those advances made by Prandtl (see von Karman’s Wind and Beyond). Reissner was also celebrated with two anniversary volumes of Applied MAthematiics for his 60th and 75th birthdays (in 1934 and 1949).]

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

This is immensely appealing to me. Some of this still goes on today, either manually like this or electronically, but not nearly enough. We are inundated with blather. I'm not saying every tweet, email, and blog post should be vetted by a hierarchy of editors and proofreaders, but even would-be authoritative publications seem more haphazard. Partly it's the economics of journalism and publishing these days, partly it's cultural. John McPhee has an interesting piece in a recent NYer that includes reflections on the NYer's "grammarian" Miss Gould, who was much more than a mere grammar cop. But the care in expression described makes me feel safe somehow--all is not lost.