UNIQUE HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS OR JARNÍK’S MATHEMATICAL NOTEBOOKS FROM GÖTTINGEN

Abstract

Among the artifacts deposited in the Archive of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic are fourteen notebooks containing the lectures given by Karl Grandjot, Pavel Sergeevich Aleksandrov, Bartel Leendert van der Waerden and Emmy Amalie Noether in Göttingen in the 1920s. These unique and valuable notebooks were kept by Vojtěch Jarník, the future Czech university professor of mathematics, during his studies at the University in Göttingen. In this article, we attempt to give a basic characterization of Jarník’s notebooks, to describe the historical background of their “birth” and to show their mathematical contents.

Keywords

• Czech Mathematics
• Göttingen University
• Vojtěch Jarník
• 20th Century