One Lecture, Two Results
Two things came from Albert Einstein’s packed-to-capacity Josian Gibbs Lecture to the American Mathematical Society in what is now Kresge Theater on Dec. 28, 1934 — an historic image and a student who went on to make history.
Einstein’s lecture, attended by AMS members and a few members of the public, was the source of the only image of the physicist with a variation of his famous equation describing the equivalence of mass and energy, E = mc², in front of him on a blackboard. The grainy photo, taken from the theater’s balcony, shows Einstein gesturing to one of the boards. He delivered the lecture in English, a rarity for him, and spoke for less than an hour.
One person who saw the lecture had to sneak in and watch from the rafters. That was Carnegie Tech physics student Philip Morrison, who went on to help build the first atomic bomb as a member of the Manhattan Project.
Courtesy of The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Americanjewisharchives.org.
This is the only known image of Einstein with a variant of his famous equation, E = mc².
Courtesy of The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Americanjewisharchives.org.
Einstein visited the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1934.