The 1998 International Congress Mathematicians in Berlin was a "best approximation" to the first centenial of David Hilbert's hugely influential set of twenty-three problems, presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, in August 1900. The European Congress of Mathematicians in Barcelona of August 2000 will be another. Here we propose to recall the personality and mathematical values of Hilbert by focusing on the short public radio broadcast he made on the occasion of his retirement from Götingen some thirty years later.
In his broadcast, Hilbert answered, with poetic clarity, some basic questions on the nature of mathematics, which, for the politics of science in society, are as vital today as they were in 1930.
This broadcast is similar to the concluding
paragraphs of a long address "Naturerkennen und Logik", which
Hilbert gave on the same day,
For an extended commentary on this broadcast, see a
forthcoming article "We Shall Know: Hilbert's Apology" by Victor
Vinnikov The precise text of this broadcast seems relatively little
known even in 1998, and even among mathematicians. It is more
tightly constructed than the corresponding subset of the full
address, which appears in Hilbert's collected works. We are
unaware of any early publication of it as an autonomous tract, or
of any early translations of it. To make amends for this
unfortunate neglect, the editors here propose, as a challenge to
mathematicians, the translation of this broadcast into the many
languages in which mathematics is practised.
In the last few years,
translations
into
English
and
French
have been made. They are annexed along with the original
German
version in order to facilitate further translations by
mathematicians whose knowlege of German might otherwise prove
inadequate. Enjoy! [ Please consult Contest
Rules! ] A Russian translation by Vladimir Averbukh was submitted on 30 March 1998. It was posted
here on April 15 1998 after patient conversion to a variety
of formats that together should provide readability worldwide. Prof. Averbukh's effort makes Hilbert's broadcast available henceforth in all the four official languages of the 1998 ICM; the editors therefore hastened to award him a complementary copy of
MathCD.
A Danish translation was submitted on 3 July 1998 by three nathematicians from Aalborg University: L. Fajstrup, M. Raussen, and U. Rønnow. Then on 15 July H.J. Munkolm of Aarhus responded with an
alternative Danish translation, explaining: "It goes [...] in the direction of preserving a declamatory style.
It is quite literal, but first
of all, it is meant to be read aloud -- and the reader should pay
attention to punctuation. Actually, Danish and German are close enough for such an approach to produce good, old fashioned Danish -- the type that announcers in the Danish Radio would use in the fifties."
An Italian translation was submitted on 9 September 1998 by Paolo Nardini of Lucca, Italy.
With this, he completed a first "clean sweep"; indeed, back
in June 1998, he had captained translations for both halves of the
Galois competition.
A Portuguese translation was submitted on 16 February 1999 by a professed admirer of Hilbert, physicist L. Fraser Monteiro, of Lisbon, Portugal.
A Spanish translation was submitted on 29 July 1999 by Milton del Castillo Lesmes Acosta, of Bagota, Colombia.
There is still just time to get your ground-breaking
translation on the first edition of MathCD; latecomers will have to await a second edition.
To launch this process,
I offer the source text of Galileo located for me (LS) by Paolo Nardini
in "Galilei, Il Saggiatore", (a cura di Libero Sosio),
Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, Prima edizione, 1965, pag. 38:
Context, dates, and translations would, of course, be welcome.
I include in the scope of this challenge the historical
elucidation of the term "ignorabimus" as used by Hilbert, noting
the hint of connection to the writings of Dubois-Raymond
mentioned in comments on the English translation.
German Original
Many browsers will allow you to view several translations in parallel in as many windows. To launch a new window for a hyperreference, one can usually
click the mouse on it -- perhaps while holding down a "modifier" key
(Control, Option, Command as the case may be).
(Back to top.) Please send comments on this page to
Laurent SiebenmannLocating Hilbert's sources
Hilbert's broadcast quotes luminaries of the past:
Galileo, Kant, Gauss, Kronecker, Poincaré, Tolstoi, Jacobi.
The dispersion of library resources for science is a formidable obstacle to mathematicians finding the corresponding original texts. Happily, electronic techniques give us fresh opportunities
to shrink the core of science to human dimensions.
Let us seize one such opportunity
by pooling our resources here on internet to locate the
original passages that Hilbert refers to.
La filosofia é scritta in questo grandissimo libro
che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi a gli occhi (io
dico l'universo), ma non si puó intendere se prima non
s'impara a intender la lingua, e conoscer i caratteri,
né quali é scritto.
Egli é scritto in lingua
matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli, cerchi, ed
altre figure geometriche, senza i quali mezi é
impossibile a intendere umanamente parola; senza questi
é un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro laberinto.
All the translations in review
English Translation
French Translation
Russian Translation
Danish Translation #1
Danish Translation #2
Italian Translation
Portuguese Translation
Spanish Translation
The Galois Contest
(Back to CD-ROM page.)
e-mail: LCS@topo.math.u-psud.fr