Herbrand Photograph by Natascha Artin Brunswick

I came across this long-lost photograph of Jacques Herbrand in a paper by Marcel Guillaume, “La logique mathématique en France entre les deux guerres mondiales : Quelques repères,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 1/2009 (Tome 62) , p. 177-219. It turns out that the photo was taken by Natascha Artin Brunswick in 1931, when Herbrand visited Hamburg.  Artin Brunswick was a gifted photographer, whose work was recognized by an exhibition entitled Hamburg: Wie ich es sah at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg in 2001.  (The museum bookstore still had copies of the exhibition catalog a few months ago, although you have to email them as it’s not in the online selection.) Together with her husband Emil Artin, she emigrated to the US in 1937, and worked at NYU’s Courant Institute from 1946 until her retirement in 1989, primarily as Technical Editor of the Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. According to her son Tom Artin, the Herbrand picture is one of the photos of mathematicians that she had thumb-tacked to her bulletin board at the Courant Institute literally for decades. Many thanks to Tom Artin for permission to share the picture here.

[Photo:  Natascha Artin-Brunswick, © Estate of Natascha Artin-Brunswick.]

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