ABSTRACT
I was once a member of a subcommittee to look into junior appointments; we chose George Mackey, a recent Ph.D. student of Marshall Stone. We also reappointed Lars Ahlfors, who had left the department to return to Finland during the war. However, we did not make any senior appointments from outside the department; we could have considered the possibility of appointing André Weil, an outstanding French mathematician who had become a refugee during the war, but we never did. I was quite aware of his abilities-at one point, I persuaded the AMS to invite him to give an hour address at one of its New York meetings, and he gave a good address on some of his important discoveries in algebraic geometry. Eventually, he did come to an American university, going first to Lehigh, and then, after an appointment at the University of São Paolo, Brazil, he went to the University of Chicago.
