My April Newsmax article, about the 136 Jewish-American Nobel science laureates, featured physicist Roy Glauber, who, as an 18-year-old Harvard undergraduate in 1943, was recruited for the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Mathematician Peter Lax, who turned 97 in May, is another Jewish scientific prodigy from New York City who worked under Robert Oppenheimer in building the first three nuclear bombs.
While Glauber graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1941, and Lax from Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School in 1943, their earlier lives could not have been more harrowingly different.
Glauber (1925-2018) was born and reared in NYC; Lax grew-up in Budapest. During the last two months of 1941, his family miraculously escaped, at the 11th hour, by a marathon train ride to Lisbon, and then by boat to America.
Lax's parents were physicians friendly with many prominent Jewish-Hungarian scientists. Leó Szilárd, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller are four of these intellectual giants who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s and made significant contributions to the successful construction of the first nuclear bombs in the summer of 1945.
In early 1942 in NYC, 15-year-old Peter Lax was visited by Neumann, who was then working at the Institute of Advanced Studies in nearby Princeton, New Jersey, and also contributing to the Manhattan Project.
His family also befriended Richard Courant, the distinguished Jewish-German mathematician and administrator at NYU. Before being drafted into the U.S. Army in the spring of 1944, Lax attended NYU for three semesters.
After World War II, he earned a bachelor's, master's and doctorate from NYU's world-famous Mathematical Institute, which Courant established in 1935 and was named for him in 1964. Before escaping from Nazi Germany in 1934, he was the top lieutenant to David Hilbert at Göttingen University's world-renowned mathematics institute.
That same year, Bernhard Rust (1883-1945), Nazi Germany's Minister for Science, Education and Popular Culture, asked Professor Hilbert if it was "really true that your institute suffered so much from the departure of the Jews and their friends."
Hilbert, one of the greatest mathematicians during the last 150 years, famously replied: "Suffered? No, it hasn't suffered, Herr Minister. It simply doesn't exist anymore!"
Moreover, before the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933 and the mass dismissals of Jewish professors and students from German universities, many distinguished physicists and chemists were associated with Göttingen, including Nobel laureates Max Born, Enrico Fermi, James Franck, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Wolfgang Pauli and Otto Stern.
Robert Oppenheimer earned his Ph.D. there in 1927.
In a 2016 oral-history interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Professor Lax, who taught at NYU for many decades, praised von Neumann's remarkable scientific contributions before, during, and after World War II.
But he was puzzled that Neumann (1903-57) "is almost totally unknown" in the 21st century. Inexcusably, he is missing from the current mega-hit movie "Oppenheimer."
Amazingly, John Kemeny (1926-92) is another Jewish teenage mathematical prodigy whose family fled from Hungary to NYC in 1940, and worked at Los Alamos during the war.
A 1943 graduate of George Washington High School in upper Manhattan, whose other noted contemporaneous alumni include Henry Kissinger, Alan Greenspan and Moshe Arens (former Israeli foreign and defense minister), Kemeny was also the inventor with Thomas Kurtz of the BASIC Programming Language in 1964, and president of Dartmouth between 1970 and 1981.
One major reason that America built the atomic bomb during World War II, and Germany did not, is it welcomed many world-class, immigrant European scientists, Jewish and Christian.
Beginning in Nazi Germany in 1933, a chain-reaction of scientific emigration started in Nazi Germany and then spread with its military conquests: Austria, 1938; Czechoslovakia, 1938-39; Poland, 1939; and Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France and Netherlands in 1940.
The last escapees to Los Alamos were Danish physicists Niels Bohr and son Aage, both Nobel laureates, by airplane from Sweden in October 1943.
A second reason for America's success in constructing the atomic bomb is that many young Americans played crucial roles in the Manhattan. Physicist Richard Feynman, a graduate of NYC's Far Rockaway High School and future Nobelist, was 25 years old when posted to Los Alamos.
A third reason is that recruitment wasn't hamstrung by the infamous numerus clausus," which restricted the number of Jewish students and professors during the first half of the 20th century at many European and American universities.
Indeed, in the late 1930s, the chairman of physics department at UC Berkeley, Raymond Thayer Birge, rejected Oppenheimer's request to hire Robert Serber, because "one Jew in the department is enough."
In early 1942, Oppenheimer recruited the 32-year-old Philadelphia native for the Manhattan Project.
Oppenheimer, Serber and nine other pivotal theoretical physicists at Los Alamos were Jewish.
Lax has won many prestigious mathematics awards including the Wolf Prize in 1987, Abel Prize in 2005, and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Science in 1986.
The New York Academy of Sciences should add him to its list of more than 200 honorary members and fellows. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are among the earliest inductees of this prestigious institution, founded more than two centuries ago.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science. Read Mark Schulte's Reports — More Here.
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