ABSTRACT
Courant managed matters so that the pair walked through some thorny bushes, at which point Courant informed Hilbert that he had evidently torn his pants on one of the bushes. David Hilbert was born and grew up in a Protestant family in the town of Konigsberg in the Eastern part of Prussia, a town proud to remember that it had been the home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. During the two centuries that had elapsed between the invention of the calculus by Leibniz and Newton and the years when David Hilbert was becoming a mathematician, a host of workers had found many spectacular applications of limit processes. Among the mathematical "treasures" his methods would rescue, Hilbert emphatically included Cantor's transfinite numbers, of which he said, "This appears to me to be the most admirable flower of the mathematical intellect and in general one of the highest achievements of purely rational human activity.".
