Why Einstein came to work every day

Posted Thursday afternoon, November 26, 2020.

Albert Einstein (left, in gray overcoat) and Kurt Gödel(in black, right) taking a walk at Princeton University, 1954. Via Prospect Magazine.

Two young mathematicians at Oxford in the late 1980s take a walk in spirit with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel at Princeton in the mid-1950s:

When we left, Zafar suggested that we walk back to college, rather than take a bus, and I agreed, assuming that he wanted to discuss something. The mathematician Kurt Gödel used to walk, setting off at sunset and returning after midnight, and found that his best ideas came to him in this stretch of time. Albert Einstein, who was deeply fond of Gödel, and who was also at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, used to say in his later years, when he no longer engaged in much research, that he went to the institute daily only for the privilege of walking home with Kurt.

---from “In the Light of What We Know”, a novel by Zia Haider Rahman.

Comments

[Lauren Romeo]

And they thought of great things...