Mathematics in Wartime: Private Reflections of Clifford Truesdell

Abstract

Our featured guest writer in this column of Years Ago, Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III (1919–2000), was a cantankerous mathematical physicist turned historian of mathematics, who taught at the Midwestern universities of Michigan and Indiana before going on to distinguished career at Johns Hopkins University. Truesdell was a man of many parts. Those who knew him, whether admirers or not, would all attest that he stood apart as an American thoroughly in love with European culture. Yet Truesdell’s Europe was not that of leftists like the writer Jean-Paul Sartre or the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder; nor was he enamored of the music of modernist composers, not even Igor Stravinsky’s, much less the electronic experimentalism of a Karlheinz Stockhausen. What moved him instead were the achievements of Europeans of the eighteenth century. Truesdell loved baroque music, insisting however that it be played if at all possible on instruments from the era. All his tastes—in science as well as art—ran decidedly toward classicism. And since he took his interests in the arts and sciences seriously, he chose to spend his last decades in Baltimore living the life of a cultivated European surrounded by memorabilia from the baroque age.