ABSTRACT
J.S.: Let’s start with the growth of applied mathematics as an American discipline. In your 1961 article “Applied Mathematics as a Science” for the American Mathematical Monthly you wrote, “The great majority of the senior faculty in applied mathematics are products of a European education”—mostly Germany and England-“men like Friedrichs, Courant, Goldstein, and Lin.” 1 H.P.G.: That goes back to the late forties. From Germany, NYU had Richard Courant and Kurt Friedrichs, and Brown University had William Prager. We had Eric Reissner, who was a pre-war émigré but had done his doctorate at MIT. And Caltech had Theodore von Kármán and a fi rst-rate group in aerodynamics.
