Friday, August 2, 2013

13-14.07.2013 Göttingen and (mathematical) Sight-seeing

I visited Göttingen in the middle of July, to see friends and give a talk in a seminar. All of us were mathematicians, so we we went to sight-see and math-sight-see. :)

Here's the observatory of Gauß:

Gaußische Sternwarte :)
In the nice cemetery was his grave-stone. His name is written in old Fraktur -- you can see how "ß" is a ligature of the two kinds of s's that were written there (the long one that looks more like an "l", followed by the "normal" one) at the end of his name:


das Grab von Gauß
We also saw Riemann's house, but it didn't look that interesting, so I give you no picture of it .

We went through the math building and looked at the model collection they have there. At the university of Illinois, we had many models as well (one of the profs had been a student of Klein, a very important prof in the history of Uni Göttingen, and he'd had the models ordered for U Illinois).


mathematical models
Boy's surface
3-fold toroidal Möbiusband with cloverleaf-knot as boundary
Orthogonal Familis on the sphere
hyperbolic stuff
There were also soap-bubble frames which produced nice geometric shapes:



We also saw some of the books in the rather expansive collections of famous mathematicians:
Bücher, die zum Prof. Klein gehört

Outside of mathematical things, we also went through the old botanical garden. It was not everywhere well taken care of, for instance, this desert greenhouse:

nicht so gut gepflegt
On the edge of the garden was a nice Cafe, Cafe Botanik I drank a ,,persian Dream'' on the first day and on the second day we had breakfast there. Very tasty. I also found the plateware very sweet and nice:


A little about/in Göttingen itself. I think it's great that Göttingen still has its old fortifications/wall. Here is how part of it looks now: 

Wallanlagen
More photos (by someone else) here.

There were also a fair amount of murals and graffiti. Here was the back side of an Aldi (Fairer handel ~ fair trade):



There were also some like this following, which were paper glued onto a wall (perhaps nicer/easier to take off later?): 
Graffitti

There was also an interesting-looking memorial for the former synagogue. 
How it looked depended strongly on exactly where one stood/faced. Here are two views: 

nearby
from below
Here is a pdf which has the story (in German) and also another picture where you can see another star (from the shadows produced).

Göttingen wasn't really bombed during the second world war, so they still have a lot of old buildings:



I think this is the oldest that still stood

And, in closing, have some art :)




[Pending blog entries: my entire trip to Austria, which was 18.07 - 28.07 :) ]

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