On my trip to Europe, August 1–9, 1989

Abstract

My daughter Anne brought me to Boston' s Logan Airport to catch the Northwest plane departing 8.20 P.M. for Amsterdam. A few hours in the air and we heard that one of the engines had become naughty, and so we returned to Boston. Better late than dead. After an hour at Logan we departed again and arrived at Schiphol (Amsterdam) at 2.15 P.M. (instead of at 8 A.M.). A peeved nephew with wife and child was waiting; he had already been at the airport since 8 A.M. I was also peeved, and so we cancelled our peevishness against one another. Henkjan Struik, wife Betty, and son Thomas (aged 10) received me hospitably in their home in the inner city. I spent one day and a half in Amsterdam, saw my sister-in-law Truida, now twice a widow, in her pleasant apartment on the Nassaukade. She had to sell her old home on the Bloemgracht for a good price; the house is now beautifully restored with two ornamental laterns and an old-fashioned gable-stone Eenhoorn (The Unicorn). It is part of a general restoration of ancient houses in Amsterdam, quite successful. On August 2, Wednesday, I met Joop Morrien, of the CPN paper Waarheid (Truth, Pravda), and we saw restorations and the building in which the paper is produced. I was of interest as an old timer, probably the only still surviving charter member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (founded 1918). Morrien, I find, has given me a nice write-up in the paper. In the afternoon I took the train to Utrecht, where after some search in a suburb I found the publishing house Last winter I prepared a new Dutch translation of the Concise History of Mathematics at the request of Het Spectrum. I talked with editor De Jong who told me that they had little trouble with my handwriting (who can type Dutch in Boston?) and I may expect printed proofs in September. And so I hope for the best, since one of my Utrecht colleagues has kept an occasional eye on this business. Early in the morning of Tuesday, August 3, I boarded a train to Hamburg. I love such train rides with glances here at Deventer, Osnabriick, and Bremen. At the Central Station in Hamburg, arriving at 2:15 P.M., I met by appointment my friend David Rowe--he is the colleague who prepared that interview published in The Mathematical Intelligencer (New York) and NTM (Leipzig). He was with Karin Reich, from Stuttgart, whose work on the history of differential geometry I know.