Mathematics at Duke: The 1930's

Duke University was formally indentured in 1924 with gifts from James Buchanan Duke amounting to more than $40,000,000. He expected that his new "gothic wonderland" would soon compete with Harvard and Yale. "Get the best executives and educators, no matter what they cost." [JW Jenkins, James B. Duke, Master Builder]. And so the University offered salaries ranging from $2000 per year for instructors to $7500 for a very few eminent professors. And teaching loads were only 12 hours per week?! [Durden, The Launching of Duke University]

This scale was generous for the day. One distinguished scholar, on being offered such a “dazzling” salary, wrote back “I accept with pleasure. Where is Duke University” [Time, February 7, 1953]. Even for junior faculty, this salary was reasonable considering that they could live in University owned apartments or dorms.

Tuition remained at $100 per semester from 1930 until after World War II while total expenses with room and board inched up from $500 to $650 per year. Only after World War II, did tuition start its steep climb that continues to this day. Tuition was not the only thing that experienced rapid inflation. In 1936, about 40% of the grades in undergraduate courses were C's with less than 10% A's and over 20% D's and F's [Report of the President, Bulletin of Duke University, 1934-35]. The enrollment in Trinity (men’s) College rose to about 1800 in the late 1930's with Woman's College enrollment about half that. General curriculum courses included 6 semester hours of English Comp, 6 of math, 16 in natural science, 6 in social science, 6 in Religion, and 6 to 12 hours of both French and German.

Four names dominated the Duke Math department in the 1930's and 1940's: Joseph M Thomas, John Roberts, Leonard Carlitz and John Gergen. For the first five years of Duke University, Trinity College Vice President Robert Flowers, who also served as math department chairman, had limited success assembling a research faculty. Finally in 1930 to 1932, he managed to hire Thomas, Roberts and Carlitz. With the hiring of John Gergen in 1936 came a stable period with few permanent additions or resignations to the graduate faculty for more than a decade. At that time, the department had nine regular faculty members of whom six had doctorates.

In 1931, 35 undergraduate math courses were offered including six precalculus courses, three semesters of calculus, four probability and stat courses, and four advanced geometry courses. This changed little during the next decade, with the exception of a timely course in the early 1940's, The mathematics of artillery fire offered by JM Thomas, a World War I artillery officer.

Thomas, Roberts, Carlitz, and Gergen taught most of the graduate level courses until the 1950’s. In the early 1930's, 8 year-long sequences and two semester courses in analysis and differential equations, a semester course in differential geometry and another in algebraic geometry were listed in the Bulletin. By 1940, this had broadened to include courses in number theory, modern algebra, and topology. The first Masters degree in math was awarded in 1926. During the 1930's, an average six students were awarded Masters per year while only six individuals received a Ph.D in that decade. Due to the pressure of World War II, ten doctorates were awarded between 1940 and 1942 followed by five years with none awarded.

Growing up in Philadelphia, Leonard Carlitz showed remarkable academic talents that led to him being awarded a scholarship to study mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his bachelors in 1927 and his Ph.D. in 1930 at age 22 under the direction of H H Mitchell, a student of Veblen. His dissertation Galois fields of certain types extended work of E. Artin. After receiving his doctorate, Carlitz was awarded a Fellowship for study at Cal Tech and Cambridge University, where he worked with G.H. Hardy. In 1932 he accepted an Assistant Professorship at Duke University and remained on the Faculty until he retired in 1977. In his long career, continuing even after his retirement from Duke, Carlitz published 771 papers, supervised 44 doctoral and 51 masters theses. His major mathematical contributions are to finite field theory, number theory and combinatorics.

[ http://turnbull.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Carlitz.html ]

Gergen earned his BA and MA at the University of Minnesota and received his doctorate from Rice in 1928. Flowers tried to hire him as early as 1932, but Gergen turned down the early offers. Eventually in 1936, Gergen accepted a position as Associate Professor and was named chairman a year later. He continued as chair until he was forced to retire for health reasons in 1966. Gergen was instrumental in the establishment of the Office of Ordinance Research (later to become AROD) and received the Distinguished Civilian Service medal in 1959 in recognition of his contributions. In 1958, he organized a program to train retired military officers to teach math. Among the graduates of this program were Henry Katz and L.P. Smith each of whom served many years as very popular instructors in the department. According to his student Walter Rudin, who entered the undergraduate program in fall 1945 and received his Ph.D. in June 1949, "Gergen was chairman, the sort of chairman who delegates nothing and tells everyone what to do and how to do it and when to do it. [Rudin - The Way I Remember it].

Roberts was also 22 when he received his doctorate at the University of Texas under the direction of the legendary R.L. Moore with a thesis extending a result of Karl Menger. After positions at Pennsylvania and Texas, he accepted an Assistant Professorship at Duke in 1932. During his 40 years at Duke, Roberts had 24 Ph.D. students, was director of graduate studies for the department from 1948 to 1960, and was acting chair of the mathematics department from 1966 to 1968. He served as managing editor of the Duke Mathematical Journal from 1951 to 1960 and was Secretary of the American Mathematical Society in 1954. On a sabbatical at Princeton in 1937-38 he wrote a joint paper with N. Steenrod. Roberts is best known for his foundational work in dimension theory.

This genial Texan gave frequent parties for math faculty and graduate students. It was at these parties that Walter Rudin and Mary Ellen Estill got to know each other. Among Robert’s students was Richard Hodel, recently retired from the department. [ http://at.yorku.ca/t/o/p/c/51.htm ]

As did Carlitz, J.M. Thomas completed his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his doctorate in 1923. On a post doctoral fellowship, he visited Princeton, where he co-authored several papers with Veblen, and Harvard and Paris. After returning to Pennsylvania for a few years, he accepted an Assistant Professorship at Duke in 1930 as the department’s first serious research professor in mathematics. Thomas launched the Duke Mathematical Journal in 1935 and served as managing editor for over a decade. Thomas published prolifically in differential equations and analysis, including books on differential equations, Galois theory and the Mathematics of Artillery Fire. Among Thomas’ 11 doctoral students was Ruth Stokes ‘31, the first math Ph.D. at Duke.

Thomas is less fondly remembered for his frequent feuding with others in the department. Although he appeared to have strongly supported hiring Gergen, he soon began to resent his authority and felt that he should "have a turn at being chairman." [Rudin - The Way I Remember it]. Thomas grew increasingly alienated from the department. Although Seth Warner joined the faculty in 1955, he cannot remember ever seeing Thomas. In 1965, Thomas resigned from the department. After his name appeared in the directory as professor emeritus, he sent a three page vitriolic diatribe to President Knight demanding that all connection with Duke be formally severed. Among other things, he complained of "the continuing attempt to coerce me to teach courses some of which were at the undergraduate level and none of which were of my choosing." [Folder on Thomas in Duke News Bureau biographical file].

In 1939, Gergen hired Ralph Boas as instructor. After receiving his doctorate at Harvard in 1937, Boas spent a year in Cambridge to study with Hardy and Littlewood. His stay at Duke however was not long. When the US entered the war, Boas took a leave to teach at the Flight Training School in Chapel Hill. In May 1943, he left for Harvard and then settled into a long tenure at Northwestern. Boas wrote over 200 papers including the amusing "How to Hunt a Lion" with Frank Smithies under the pseudonym H. Petard.

In his autobiographical essay, [Boas, Alexanderson, and Mugler, Lion Hunting & Other Mathematical Pursuits], Boas writes "In my first two years at Duke I slept in a dormitory room but really lived in my office in the physics [Gray] building." In 1940, Boas invited math part-time instructor, Mary Layne, to the Duke concert series. A year later they married and both continued to teach in spite of the then common nepotism rules. Theirs was one of several romances within the math department, including Walter and Mary Ellen Rudin and Dick and Margaret Hodel to be discussed in future chapters. Much earlier, professor W.W. Elliott dated the young assistant professor Julia Dale but their romance was tragically cut short by her illness and death.