Let’s face it, we love anniversaries that are multiples of 10 (not to mention those that are multiples of 25).
Among the various X-anniversaries being celebrated this year, I have noticed, because of their curious connection, these four:
1) the XL anniversary of the lecture “Propriétés élémentaires d’accouplementaires del produits tensoriels topologiques” that Laurent Schwartz gave in February 1977 in Seville, the first lecture given at our university by a Fields Medal laureate (you can see a picture of the preparatory notes of the lecture in the Schwartz Archive of the École Polytechnique de Paris, by writing “Seville” in the blank box provided);
2) the 15th anniversary of the death of Schwartz himself (he died on July the Fourth, Independence Day, having fought so hard against US policy in Vietnam!);
3) the CXXXth anniversary of the birth, on 22 April 1887, of Harald Bohr, great football player (silver medalist at the 1908 Olympiad, he is circled in the Danish national team photo) and great mathematician, brother of Niels Bohr;
4) the LXXth anniversary of the first Harmonic Analysis Colloquium organised by the Bourbaki group and held in Nancy in June 1947, where Schwartz and Bohr met.
So what? A very interesting article has just been published in the journal Historia Matematica by M.J. Barany, A.-S. Paumier and J. Lützen entitled The internationalization of Laurent Schwartz and his theory of distributions, where they narrate how Bohr, almost literally, fell in love with Schwartz’s Theory of Distributions, contributed substantially to making it internationally known and, last but not least, had an absolutely decisive influence on the awarding of the Fields Medal to Schwartz at the ICM held at Harvard University in 1950.
Although I recommend reading the article directly, in order to learn about some aspects (good and bad) of the social and personal framework in which mathematical work is carried out, I cannot resist the temptation to extract two quotes. The first, from the authors themselves, begins with a terrific sentence (italics mine): “Among the many contributions of beer to the social and institutional life of mathematicians, one of the greatest was the role of the Carlsberg Foundation in financing the construction of a building for the new Institute of Mathematics at the University of Copenhagen which opened in 1934 under the direction of Harald Bohr”.
The second, from a 1947 letter from Schwartz to his wife Marie-Hélène in which, somewhat astonished and alarmed by the success, in his view excessive, of what was still the beginnings of a promising theory: “I am a little uneasy that all this resembles the compliments that the Magi from all over the world paid to Jesus Christ;… did they not crucify him afterwards?” Or, as the recently deceased State Attorney General (RIP) put it, “The harder they fall”.
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