Chapter 6 Visiting the United States (1930–1931)

[Chapter Thirteen of Menger's Reminiscences deals with Menger's visit to the United States in the academic year1930/31, but it is restricted to Menger's stay at Harvard, where he spent the fall semester and lectured on dimension theory and metric geometry. At Cambridge, Menger met, among others, ‘the outstanding mathematician’ G.D. Birkhoff; the philosopher H. M. Sheffer, who ‘had discovered in 1913 that all particles of the calculus of propositions can be expressed in terms of a single one’, ‘extensive[ly] used’ in Wittgenstein's Tractatus ‘without mentioning its author’; P. Weiss, N. Wiener and J. Schumpeter, the latter being a visiting scholar as well. But the person who most impressed Menger was P. Bridgman, who ‘appeared to him as a modern reincarnation of Mach’(Menger, 1994, pp. 158–173). The ‘Harvard sections’ of Menger's Reminiscences are comprised between paragraphs 14 and 15 of the present publication and are not reprinted].