Memory Keeper

Felix Klein was borh April 25, 1849, and in honor of his birth I am posting about something Constance Reid referred to as "almost his signature" - the Göttingen Collection of Mathematical Models. This is the largest collection of mathematical models in Germany and has items going back as far as the 1780s. It was established and curated by Felix Klein.

In Klein's time, the center for mathematical life at the University of Göttingen was the third floor of the Auditorienhaus (pictured above), and it was in a corridor here that the collection was first housed. Klein had a vision for the math department to have its own institute, and this eventually came to pass. Gottingen's Mathematical Institute, the Mathematisches Institut, (pictured below) opened in 1929. Sadly, this happened four years after Klein's death.

Gottingen's Collection of Mathematical Models, no longer relegated to a corridor, has a spacious area dedicated to it in the Institute. This is the largest collection of historical mathematical models in Germany, comprishing about 540 exhibits in 63 showcases.

The items in the collection date from as far back as 1780 to as recent as video images of fractal objects. The objects from 1780 include a stellated polyhedra that belonged to Abraham Kästner - the doctoral advisor of the doctoral advisor of Carl Freidrich Gauss.

A modern visitor noticed that - ironically - the collection did not contain a Klein bottle (Kleinsche Flasche). They later donated one.

I had already put up a post about the Göttingen Collection of Mathematical Models back in 2016 when I visited, but I felt it deserved a revisit today in honor of its founder Felix Klein. So on this day, April 25, let's raise a bottle - though perhaps one topologically different from his namesake - to this great mathematician and memory keeper.