Miriam Yevick on her colleague, Agnes Berger – ein Kultivierter Mensch

From a piece Yevick wrote about a recently-deceased friend:

Memoir: To Agnes Berger (1916-2002) and Our Friendship, Newsletter, Association for Women in Mathematics, Volume 33, Number 1, January-February 2003, 7-10.

Sisterhood:

We met in the fall of 1947 in the Columbia Mathematics library, a four-flight climb up the rotunda. We were in the same situation: women Ph.D.'s in mathematics without a position because of our gender. Upon her arrival in the U.S. Agnes had approached yon Neumann, an acquaintance from Hungary, for advice on how to further her career. He suggested---even though a decade later he wrote a letter of recommendation in which he spoke very highly of her abilities--that she should work as a housekeeper and do mathematics at night. I had a similar experience upon earning my degree at MIT. The woman in charge of placing women graduates informed me that "of course I could not get an academic position in mathematics as a woman" and that I should opt for being a technical assistant. However, not long after her arrival, Agnes had "captured" (in Erdös language) Laçzy, a successful stockbroker. "Something was happening," she told me later, so she concentrated on her goal of establishing a family, which also had interfered with her ambitions. Yet we each were determined to stay with our vocation, so we dragged ourselves uptown (I lived in Hoboken, Agnes on the East Side) and up the stairs. We faithfully attended seminars, we studied the books, we attempted to do some research on our own and we wondered about what, as women, we should do with our lives. Agnes had a two-year-old toddler at home and wanted another baby. 1In the face of our ambivalency, we supported each other in our work.

Flirting, “in the European upper-middle-class tradition, exclaimed”:

Agnes and Laçzy rented a summer cottage when Johnny was five, the Sommerfrische a city child needed. Agnes felt rather out of sorts as a vacation mother with no opportunity to do her own work. She invited me for a weekend. The weather was balmy and the mosquitoes out in force, the moon was full. "A great night for making love," Agnes whispered to me. However Johnny together with a group of age-mates had discovered a machine from which freely gushed Coca-Cola. The whole pack, high on the drink, rampaged all over the colony. They were eventually subdued and the night was still long.

One day I gave a lecture at the Columbia Statistics seminar in which I held my ground against some notable in the audience who did not understand me and harassed me. "I admire your courage in talking back," Agnes said to me. This critic called me to his office and sweated as I once more explained myself in greater detail. "Why must you do such hard things?" he finally lamented. A newcomer in the department, later Professor at Harvard, shared the office with this mathematician. The newcomer listened to my argument and showed the notable critic that my conclusions were correct. I met Agnes in the corridor and praised my supporter to Agnes. Agnes, who could be a flirt in the European upper-middle-class tradition, exclaimed: "Now, Miriam, I have an eye on him. Don't you dare!" She was equally sympathetic to my romantic dilemmas. "You must decide, Miriam, who you want to be the father of your child," she said to me at a critical juncture. Her words, spoken as we ate in the Columbia cafeteria, still ring in my ears as I think of that fateful choice.

Even the great John von Neumann could make a mistake:

Agnes continued her professional work even after she retired. Her publications include several written after she turned eighty. Meanwhile I had been talking to her about the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics to which my reading had returned after almost fifty years. I told her about an error in von Neumann's proof of the non- existence of hidden variables in quantum mechanics. This proof had been of great importance in validating Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics among physicists versus Einstein's views. A woman physicist, Grete Hermann had pointed out this error in a publication in the late nineteen thirties, but her paper was completely ignored. Agnes, in spite of her general support of those challenging orthodoxy in science, refused to believe that yon Neumann could have made a mistake. It was only after I sent her one of John Bell's papers confirming the error that she admitted to her unjustified obduracy. This discussion between us took part during the last years of her life. Two years ago, in an attempt at understanding how probability is used in Quantum Mechanics, I brought her a paper on this subject by a Professor at Cornell that I could not understand. Even though it was by then hard for her to read, she made the effort. "Rubbish!" was her opinion, as was my suspicion. If only in her honor, I am determined to prove her right in this matter. I am still working on it.

What it means to be an intellectual:

Agnes was an intellectual in the deepest sense of the word, in the spirit of the outstanding scholars Hungarian Jewry produced. She knew that her roots were in the Jewish tradition of learning even if the learning had become secular, as were the roots of her profound social conscience. She carded the burden of the world on her shoulders, as she believed all Jews should. Agnes had an admirable scientific objectivity in all her judgments. Her voice was truly authentic. She was ein Kultivierter Mensch, as her parents and mine used to say.