26
$\begingroup$

Klein's Protocols in over 8,000 pages recording seminars organized from 1872 to 1913 by Felix Klein and given by Klein, his colleagues, students and other invited speakers, including luminaries such as Hilbert and Minkowski, provide a unique window into our mathematical past. Eugene Chislenko and Yuri Tschinkel have presented a beautiful introduction to the corpus, noting how the breadth of the topics reflect the broad interests and knowledge of Klein (the authors claim that Klein was one of the last three grand mathemagicians able to soar over the full realm of the mathematics of their times, the other two being Hilbert and Poincare).

Klein 's Protocols is huge and handwritten in German, so I thought it would be helpful for aspiring and established mathematicians with an interest in the history of ideas if a listing were available on Math Overflow of some gems in the corpus. Can you make a contribution?

Please provide keywords and page references for any entry. E.g., personally, I would love to have a copy of the figure titled "On regular solids in 4-dimensional space" by W. I. Stringham in Vol. II on pg. 59 (Monday, November 29, 1880).

See also these articles (pages 16-21).

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
6
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ There is a similar list on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Klein_Protocols). It would be good to combine the two lists. $\endgroup$
    – Andreas Thom
    Commented Jun 12, 2012 at 7:35
  • $\begingroup$ This is handwritten in Sütterlin. I believe zou'll probably have a hard time finding anyone below the age of 60 who can fluently read Sütterlin. I don't get it though: Your aim is just a concise list of topic covered, or full translations? $\endgroup$
    – Malte
    Commented Jun 12, 2012 at 15:21
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @Malte: I just gave it a try. It's not easy to read, I agree (both the handwriting - not Sütterlin which was commissioned by the Prussian ministry for culture in 1911, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin - and the wording), but not much worse than reading modern handwriting... The major slowdown for me is the content, but there is no way to get around that. $\endgroup$
    – Christian Stump
    Commented Jun 12, 2012 at 18:01
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ The last pages of the examples I opened contain a table of content in the end. Has no one ever gotten these typed up and made publicly available? If not and others do the same, I would spend an hour or two to add some of these tables to the wiki page in order to get at least the content of all these seminars available. $\endgroup$
    – Christian Stump
    Commented Jun 12, 2012 at 18:13
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @Malte: I am below the age of 60 and can read the handwriting. It is really not so hard to learn it. $\endgroup$
    – Moritz Firsching
    Commented May 4, 2014 at 15:20

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
18
$\begingroup$

I compiled an index of the Protokolle which can be found here:

http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/moritz/klein/

I transcribed all the titels, names, dates and page numbers. You can do a case insensitive search. You can also view the scanned version there.

I hope this makes it easier to find the "gems in the corpus".

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
2
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Great piece of work, thanks a lot for sharing! $\endgroup$
    – Stefan Waldmann
    Commented May 4, 2014 at 16:19
  • $\begingroup$ Ditto to Stefan's. $\endgroup$
    – Tom Copeland
    Commented May 4, 2014 at 18:28
5
$\begingroup$

As said in the comments above, this is not right what Tom wanted, but I added the content of Volume 2 to the wiki, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Klein_Protocols. So far, I left it in German - do you think it is worth translating?

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
1
  • $\begingroup$ Nice! If the list is lengthened, it would be convenient to be able to do a page search in English for those of us who are not fluent in German. Thanks for the additional bio and other links in your list. $\endgroup$
    – Tom Copeland
    Commented Jun 13, 2012 at 20:23

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .