Many thanks for your card. I am always so terribly happy to hear from you and hear about how good things are for you with the Møllgaards and how well your revision and everything else is going, between the lines I, the little expert, can sense your incredible pleasantness, cleverness and all the other good qualities, both great and small which I do not want to fill several pages with as I would not find the right phrases. I am very excited to hear what your main assignment will be, though I know that you will manage anything they put in front of you in a way exceeding the mind of a Professor. Once you have received the question, you are forbidden from writing more than a little prospect card, which Ma can supply you with, at most every 14 days, likewise, you must not write to me with the exact wording of the question but |immediately delegate that task to Mummy.
I am looking forward to learning a little math. physics from you when we meet again. As far as Lorentz goes, I will only say that you share the same tastes as Poincaré, who, in a lecture about the structure of relative motion, which was very interesting but, as P. spoke in French, I understood infinitely little of it, by the definition of Rasmus Pedersen “an infinitely little amount is an amount that is and yet is not” ; in any case P. said that Lorentz at Leiden was the leader in all these areas and was responsible for what P called “la nouvelle mécanique”. In my first letter, I did not mention Abraham, who has made an excellent impression; he seems to be extremely young I do not think more than 30, he looks 26.
|Things are still going well for me. I have now spoken quite a bit with Hilbert who I like more and more. Among other things, we have spoken at the Math. Gesellsch. about conformal mappings on which he is giving lectures, and where I thought – as was shown to be correct – he had not been sufficiently correct about, an incidentally subordinate, postulate; I won’t bore you with simplicities it’s only that he hadn’t completely considered that when a conformal mapping with the help of an analytical function also the orientation of the domain was the same, if you know what I mean expressed in such uncertain terms. I am thinking of proposing a lecture in the M. G. on neue Dirichlet’sche series, and if I do, I shall do it well, |although I do not have, as I have had in previous steps, the use of a certain man’s great wisdom and fine sense for what has a worth and what only seems so. – I am listening to, as well as H’s number theory and function theory, and Landau’s prime numbers, to a very important and apparently very clever Dr. Köbe, who lectures on elliptic functions. I am looking forward to learning something real about these as I have always felt my sparse knowledge (50 pages in Jordan) of these, in any case historically for mathematics in general, and the analytical function theory in particular, fundamental function’s theory to be a great deficit.
Now, goodbye for today. Live well and enjoy the big assignment. Many greetings to the Møllgaards from your devoted little brother who looks up to you.
