'The detailed treatment of the plenary lectures' promised but not delivered: Alexander Soifer's Review in 7 movements of 'Meeting under the Integral Sign? The Oslo Congress of Mathematicians on the Eve of the Second World War by Christopher D. Hollings and Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze

摘要

We offer the authors the courtesy of commencing our review with their summary of their book that appears on the back cover together with lovely smiling postage stamp size faces of the two authors: This book examines the historically unique conditions under which the International Congress of Mathematicians took place in Oslo in 1936. This Congress was the only one on this level to be held during the period of the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945) and after the wave of emigrations from it. Relying heavily on unpublished archival sources, the authors consider the different goals of the various participants in the Congress, most notably those of the Norwegian organizers, and the Nazi-led German delegation. They also investigate the reasons for the absence of the proposed Soviet and Italian delegations.