The habilitation of John von Neumann at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin: judgements on a Hungarian-Jewish mathematician in the Germany of 1927 (Q973454)

This article tells in detail the history of John von Neumann's Habilitation at the University of Berlin in 1927. After having received his Ph.D. with a thesis on axiomatic set theory in 1926, von Neumann applied for Habilitation in 1927. To this aim he first submitted a paper which likewise was on axiomatic set theory, a few months later, however, von Neumann submitted a second paper devoted to a ``general theory of eigenvalues of symmetric functional operators.'' Presumably, some troubles had arisen because of the closeness of the subject of von Neumann's doctoral thesis and his first Habilitation paper. The second paper contained basic ideas for \textit{J. von Neumann}'s spectral theory of symmetric linear operators in Hilbert spaces, the main article on which appeared with title ``Allgemeine Eigenwerttheorie Hermitescher Funktionaloperatoren'' in 1929 only [Math. Ann. 102, 49-131 (1929; JFM 55.0824.02)], apparently after significant changing and refining his account according to suggestions by Erhard Schmidt. In the appendix, Hashagens's article also contains editions of Schmidt's, Schur's, and von Mises's assessments on von Neumann's mathematical achievements, mainly his second Habilitation paper.