Physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its motion, behavior through space and time, that studies the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves. Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines and, through its inclusion of astronomy the oldest. Over much of the past two millennia, chemistry and certain branches of mathematics, were a part of natural philosophy, but during the scientific revolution in the 17th century these natural sciences emerged as unique research endeavors in their own right. Physics intersects with many interdisciplinary areas of research, such as biophysics and quantum chemistry, the boundaries of physics which are not rigidly defined. New ideas in physics explain the fundamental mechanisms studied by other sciences and suggest new avenues of research in academic disciplines such as mathematics and philosophy. Advances in physics enable advances in new technologies.
For example, advances in the understanding of electromagnetism and nuclear physics led directly to the development of new products that have transformed modern-day society, such as television, domestic appliances, nuclear weapons. Astronomy is one of the oldest natural sciences. Early civilizations dating back to beyond 3000 BCE, such as the Sumerians, ancient Egyptians, the Indus Valley Civilization, had a predictive knowledge and a basic understanding of the motions of the Sun and stars; the stars and planets were worshipped, believed to represent gods. While the explanations for the observed positions of the stars were unscientific and lacking in evidence, these early observations laid the foundation for astronomy, as the stars were found to traverse great circles across the sky, which however did not explain the positions of the planets. According to Asger Aaboe, the origins of Western astronomy can be found in Mesopotamia, all Western efforts in the exact sciences are descended from late Babylonian astronomy.
Egyptian astronomers left monuments showing knowledge of the constellations and the motions of the celestial bodies, while Greek poet Homer wrote of various celestial objects in his Iliad and Odyssey. Natural philosophy has its origins in Greece during the Archaic period, when pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales rejected non-naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena and proclaimed that every event had a natural cause, they proposed ideas verified by reason and observation, many of their hypotheses proved successful in experiment. The Western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, this resulted in a decline in intellectual pursuits in the western part of Europe. By contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire resisted the attacks from the barbarians, continued to advance various fields of learning, including physics. In the sixth century Isidore of Miletus created an important compilation of Archimedes' works that are copied in the Archimedes Palimpsest. In sixth century Europe John Philoponus, a Byzantine scholar, questioned Aristotle's teaching of physics and noting its flaws.
He introduced the theory of impetus. Aristotle's physics was not scrutinized until John Philoponus appeared, unlike Aristotle who based his physics on verbal argument, Philoponus relied on observation. On Aristotle's physics John Philoponus wrote: “But this is erroneous, our view may be corroborated by actual observation more than by any sort of verbal argument. For if you let fall from the same height two weights of which one is many times as heavy as the other, you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend on the ratio of the weights, but that the difference in time is a small one, and so, if the difference in the weights is not considerable, that is, of one is, let us say, double the other, there will be no difference, or else an imperceptible difference, in time, though the difference in weight is by no means negligible, with one body weighing twice as much as the other”John Philoponus' criticism of Aristotelian principles of physics served as an inspiration for Galileo Galilei ten centuries during the Scientific Revolution.
Galileo cited Philoponus in his works when arguing that Aristotelian physics was flawed. In the 1300s Jean Buridan, a teacher in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris, developed the concept of impetus, it was a step toward the modern ideas of momentum. Islamic scholarship inherited Aristotelian physics from the Greeks and during the Islamic Golden Age developed it further placing emphasis on observation and a priori reasoning, developing early forms of the scientific method; the most notable innovations were in the field of optics and vision, which came from the works of many scientists like Ibn Sahl, Al-Kindi, Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Farisi and Avicenna. The most notable work was The Book of Optics, written by Ibn al-Haytham, in which he conclusively disproved the ancient Greek idea about vision, but came up with a new theory. In the book, he presented a study of the phenomenon of the camera obscura (his thousand-year-old
David Hilbert
David Hilbert was a German mathematician and one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory, calculus of variations, commutative algebra, algebraic number theory, the foundations of geometry, spectral theory of operators and its application to integral equations, mathematical physics, foundations of mathematics. Hilbert warmly defended Georg Cantor's set theory and transfinite numbers. A famous example of his leadership in mathematics is his 1900 presentation of a collection of problems that set the course for much of the mathematical research of the 20th century. Hilbert and his students contributed to establishing rigor and developed important tools used in modern mathematical physics. Hilbert is known as one of the founders of proof theory and mathematical logic, as well as for being among the first to distinguish between mathematics and metamathematics.
Hilbert, the first of two children of Otto and Maria Therese Hilbert, was born in the Province of Prussia, Kingdom of Prussia, either in Königsberg or in Wehlau near Königsberg where his father worked at the time of his birth. In late 1872, Hilbert entered the Friedrichskolleg Gymnasium. Upon graduation, in autumn 1880, Hilbert enrolled at the University of Königsberg, the "Albertina". In early 1882, Hermann Minkowski, returned to Königsberg and entered the university. Hilbert developed a lifelong friendship with the gifted Minkowski. In 1884, Adolf Hurwitz arrived from Göttingen as an Extraordinarius. An intense and fruitful scientific exchange among the three began, Minkowski and Hilbert would exercise a reciprocal influence over each other at various times in their scientific careers. Hilbert obtained his doctorate in 1885, with a dissertation, written under Ferdinand von Lindemann, titled Über invariante Eigenschaften spezieller binärer Formen, insbesondere der Kugelfunktionen. Hilbert remained at the University of Königsberg as a Privatdozent from 1886 to 1895.
In 1895, as a result of intervention on his behalf by Felix Klein, he obtained the position of Professor of Mathematics at the University of Göttingen. During the Klein and Hilbert years, Göttingen became the preeminent institution in the mathematical world, he remained there for the rest of his life. Among Hilbert's students were Hermann Weyl, chess champion Emanuel Lasker, Ernst Zermelo, Carl Gustav Hempel. John von Neumann was his assistant. At the University of Göttingen, Hilbert was surrounded by a social circle of some of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, such as Emmy Noether and Alonzo Church. Among his 69 Ph. D. students in Göttingen were many who became famous mathematicians, including: Otto Blumenthal, Felix Bernstein, Hermann Weyl, Richard Courant, Erich Hecke, Hugo Steinhaus, Wilhelm Ackermann. Between 1902 and 1939 Hilbert was editor of the Mathematische Annalen, the leading mathematical journal of the time. "Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician".
Around 1925, Hilbert developed pernicious anemia, a then-untreatable vitamin deficiency whose primary symptom is exhaustion. Those forced out included Hermann Weyl, Emmy Noether and Edmund Landau. One who had to leave Germany, Paul Bernays, had collaborated with Hilbert in mathematical logic, co-authored with him the important book Grundlagen der Mathematik; this was a sequel to the Hilbert-Ackermann book Principles of Mathematical Logic from 1928. Hermann Weyl's successor was Helmut Hasse. About a year Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked whether "the Mathematical Institute suffered so much because of the departure of the Jews". Hilbert replied, "Suffered? It doesn't exist any longer, does it!" By the time Hilbert died in 1943, the Nazis had nearly restaffed the university, as many of the former faculty had either been Jewish or married to Jews. Hilbert's funeral was attended by fewer than a dozen people, only two of whom were fellow academics, among them Arnold Sommerfeld, a theoretical physicist and a native of Königsberg.
News of his death only became known to the wider world six months. The epitaph on his tombstone in Göttingen consists of the famous lines he spoke at the conclusion of his retirement address to the Society of German Scientists and Physicians on 8 September 1930; the words were given in response to the Latin maxim: "Ignoramus et ignorabimus" or "We do not know, we shall not know": Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. In English: We mus
German Empire
The German Empire known as Imperial Germany, was the German nation state that existed from the unification of Germany in 1871 until the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918. It was founded in 1871 when the south German states, except for Austria, joined the North German Confederation. On 1 January 1871, the new constitution came into force that changed the name of the federal state and introduced the title of emperor for Wilhelm I, King of Prussia from the House of Hohenzollern. Berlin remained its capital, Otto von Bismarck remained Chancellor, the head of government; as these events occurred, the Prussian-led North German Confederation and its southern German allies were still engaged in the Franco-Prussian War. The German Empire consisted of 26 states, most of them ruled by royal families, they included four kingdoms, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, three free Hanseatic cities, one imperial territory. Although Prussia was one of several kingdoms in the realm, it contained about two thirds of Germany's population and territory.
Prussian dominance was established constitutionally. After 1850, the states of Germany had become industrialized, with particular strengths in coal, iron and railways. In 1871, Germany had a population of 41 million people. A rural collection of states in 1815, the now united Germany became predominantly urban. During its 47 years of existence, the German Empire was an industrial and scientific giant, gaining more Nobel Prizes in science than any other country. By 1900, Germany was the largest economy in Europe, surpassing the United Kingdom, as well as the second-largest in the world, behind only the United States. From 1867 to 1878/9, Otto von Bismarck's tenure as the first and to this day longest reigning Chancellor was marked by relative liberalism, but it became more conservative afterwards. Broad reforms and the Kulturkampf marked his period in the office. Late in Bismarck's chancellorship and in spite of his personal opposition, Germany became involved in colonialism. Claiming much of the leftover territory, yet unclaimed in the Scramble for Africa, it managed to build the third-largest colonial empire after the British and the French ones.
As a colonial state, it sometimes clashed with other European powers the British Empire. Germany became a great power, boasting a developing rail network, the world's strongest army, a fast-growing industrial base. In less than a decade, its navy became second only to Britain's Royal Navy. After the removal of Otto von Bismarck by Wilhelm II in 1890, the Empire embarked on Weltpolitik – a bellicose new course that contributed to the outbreak of World War I. In addition, Bismarck's successors were incapable of maintaining their predecessor's complex and overlapping alliances which had kept Germany from being diplomatically isolated; this period was marked by various factors influencing the Emperor's decisions, which were perceived as contradictory or unpredictable by the public. In 1879, the German Empire consolidated the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary, followed by the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882, it retained strong diplomatic ties to the Ottoman Empire. When the great crisis of 1914 arrived, Italy left the alliance and the Ottoman Empire formally allied with Germany.
In the First World War, German plans to capture Paris in the autumn of 1914 failed. The war on the Western Front became a stalemate; the Allied naval blockade caused severe shortages of food. However, Imperial Germany had success on the Eastern Front; the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917, contributed to bringing the United States into the war. The high command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff controlled the country, but in October after the failed offensive in spring 1918, the German armies were in retreat, allies Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, Bulgaria had surrendered; the Empire collapsed in the November 1918 Revolution with the abdications of its monarchs. This left a postwar federal republic and a devastated and unsatisfied populace, which led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism; the German Confederation had been created by an act of the Congress of Vienna on 8 June 1815 as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, after being alluded to in Article 6 of the 1814 Treaty of Paris.
German nationalism shifted from its liberal and democratic character in 1848, called Pan-Germanism, to Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck's pragmatic Realpolitik. Bismarck sought to extend Hohenzollern hegemony throughout the German states, he envisioned a Prussian-dominated Germany. Three wars led to military successes and helped to persuade German people to do this: the Second Schleswig War against Denmark in 1864, the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, the Franco-Prussian War against France in 1870–71; the German Confederation ended as a result of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 between the constituent Confederation entities of the Austrian Empire and its allies on one side and the Kingdom of Prussia and its allies on the other. The war resulted in the partial replacement of the Confederation in 1867 by a North German Confederation, comprising the 22 states north of the Main; the patriotic fervour generated by the Franco-Prussian War overwhelmed the remaining opposition to a unified Germany in the four stat
Freiburg im Breisgau
Freiburg im Breisgau is a city in Baden-Württemberg, with a population of about 220,000. In the south-west of the country, it straddles the Dreisam river, at the foot of the Schlossberg; the city has acted as the hub of the Breisgau region on the western edge of the Black Forest in the Upper Rhine Plain. A famous old German university town, archiepiscopal seat, Freiburg was incorporated in the early twelfth century and developed into a major commercial and ecclesiastical center of the upper Rhine region; the city is known for its medieval minster and Renaissance university, as well as for its high standard of living and advanced environmental practices. The city is situated in the heart of the major Baden wine-growing region and serves as the primary tourist entry point to the scenic beauty of the Black Forest. According to meteorological statistics, the city is the sunniest and warmest in Germany, held the all-time German temperature record of 40.2 °C from 2003 to 2015. Freiburg was founded by Duke Berthold III of Zähringen in 1120 as a free market town.
Frei means "free", Burg, like the modern English word "borough", was used in those days for an incorporated city or town one with some degree of autonomy. The German word Burg means "a fortified town", as in Hamburg. Thus, it is that the name of this place means a "fortified town of free citizens"; this town was strategically located at a junction of trade routes between the Mediterranean Sea and the North Sea regions, the Rhine and Danube rivers. In 1200, Freiburg's population numbered 6,000 people. At about that time, under the rule of Bertold V, the last duke of Zähringen, the city began construction of its Freiburg Münster cathedral on the site of an older parish church. Begun in the Romanesque style, it was continued and completed 1513 for the most part as a Gothic edifice. In 1218, when Bertold V died Egino V von Urach, the count of Urach assumed the title of Freiburg's count as Egino I von Freiburg; the city council wrote down its established rights in a document. At the end of the thirteenth century there was a feud between the citizens of Freiburg and their lord, Count Egino II of Freiburg.
Egino II raised taxes and sought to limit the citizens' freedom, after which the Freiburgers used catapults to destroy the count's castle atop the Schloßberg, a hill that overlooks the city center. The furious count called on his brother-in-law the Bishop of Strasbourg, Konradius von Lichtenberg, for help; the bishop responded by marching with his army to Freiburg. According to an old Freiburg legend, a butcher named Hauri stabbed the Bishop of Strasbourg to death on 29 July 1299, it was a Pyrrhic victory, since henceforth the citizens of Freiburg had to pay an annual expiation of 300 marks in silver to the count of Freiburg until 1368. In 1366 the counts of Freiburg made another failed attempt to occupy the city during a night raid; the citizens were fed up with their lords, in 1368 Freiburg purchased its independence from them. The city turned itself over to the protection of the Habsburgs, who allowed the city to retain a large measure of freedom. Most of the nobles of the city died in the battle of Sempach.
The patrician family Schnewlin took control of the city. The guilds became more powerful than the patricians by 1389; the silver mines in Mount Schauinsland provided an important source of capital for Freiburg. This silver made Freiburg one of the richest cities in Europe, in 1327 Freiburg minted its own coin, the Rappenpfennig. In 1377 the cities of Freiburg, Basel and Breisach entered into a monetary alliance known as the Genossenschaft des Rappenpfennigs; this alliance facilitated commerce among the cities and lasted until the end of the sixteenth century. There were 8,000-9,000 people living in Freiburg between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 30 churches and monasteries. At the end of the fourteenth century the veins of silver were dwindling, by 1460 only 6,000 people still lived within Freiburg's city walls. A university city, Freiburg evolved from its focus on mining to become a cultural centre for the arts and sciences, it was a commercial center. The end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance was a time of both advances and tragedy for Freiburg.
In 1457, Albrecht VI, Regent of Further Austria, established Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, one of Germany's oldest universities. In 1498, Emperor Maximilian I held a Reichstag in Freiburg. In 1520, the city ratified a set of legal reforms considered the most progressive of the time; the aim was to find a balance between old Roman Law. The reforms were well received the sections dealing with civil process law and the city's constitution. In 1520, Freiburg decided not to take part in the Reformation and became an important centre for Catholicism on the Upper Rhine. Erasmus moved here. In 1536, a strong and persistent belief in witchcraft led to the city's first witch-hunt; the need to find a scapegoat for calamities such as the Black Plague, which claimed 2,000 area residents in 1564, led to an escalation in witch-hunting that reached its peak in 1599. A plaque on the old city wall marks the spot; the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were turbulent times for Freiburg. At the beginning of the Thirty Years' War there were 10,000-14,000 citizens in Freiburg.
International Congress of Mathematicians
The International Congress of Mathematicians is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union; the Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Gauss Prize, the Chern Medal are awarded during the congress's opening ceremony. Each congress is memorialized by a printed set of Proceedings recording academic papers based on invited talks intended to be relevant to current topics of general interest. Being invited to talk at the ICM has been called "the equivalent of an induction to a hall of fame." Felix Klein and Georg Cantor are credited with putting forward the idea of an international congress of mathematicians in the 1890s. The first International Congress of Mathematicians was held in Zurich in August 1897; the organizers included such prominent mathematicians as Luigi Cremona, Felix Klein, Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Andrey Markov, others. The congress was attended by 208 mathematicians from 16 countries, including 12 from Russia and 7 from the U.
S. A. Only four were women: Iginia Massarini, Vera von Schiff, Charlotte Scott, Charlotte Wedell. During the 1900 congress in Paris, David Hilbert announced his famous list of 23 unsolved mathematical problems, now termed Hilbert's problems. Moritz Cantor and Vito Volterra gave. At the 1904 ICM Gyula Kőnig delivered a lecture where he claimed that Cantor's famous continuum hypothesis was false. An error in Kőnig's proof was discovered by Ernst Zermelo soon thereafter. Kőnig's announcement at the congress caused considerable uproar, Klein had to explain to the Grand Duke of Baden what could cause such an unrest among mathematicians. During the 1912 congress in Cambridge, Edmund Landau listed four basic problems about prime numbers, now called Landau's problems; the 1924 congress in Toronto was organized by initiator of the Fields Medal. The first two Fields Medals were awarded at the 1936 ICM in Oslo. In the aftermath of World War I, at the insistence of the Allied Powers, the 1920 ICM in Strasbourg and the 1924 ICM in Toronto excluded mathematicians from the countries part of the Central Powers.
This resulted in a still unresolved controversy as to whether to count the Strasbourg and Toronto congresses as true ICMs. At the opening of the 1932 ICM in Zürich, Hermann Weyl said: "We attend here to an extraordinary improbable event. For the number of n, corresponding to the just opened International Congress of Mathematicians, we have the inequality 7 ≤ n ≤ 9; as a consequence of this controversy, from the 1932 Zürich congress onward, the ICMs are not numbered. For the 1950 ICM in Cambridge, Laurent Schwartz, one of the Fields Medalists for that year, Jacques Hadamard, both of whom were viewed by the U. S. authorities as communist sympathizers, were only able to obtain U. S. visas after the personal intervention of President Harry Truman. The first woman to give an ICM plenary lecture, at the 1932 congress in Zürich, was Emmy Noether; the second ICM plenary talk by a woman was delivered 58 years at the 1990 ICM in Kyoto, by Karen Uhlenbeck. The 1998 congress was attended by 3,346 participants.
The American Mathematical Society reported that more than 4,500 participants attended the 2006 conference in Madrid, Spain. The King of Spain presided over the 2006 conference opening ceremony; the 2010 Congress took place in Hyderabad, India, on August 19–27, 2010. The ICM 2014 was held in Seoul, South Korea, on August 13–21, 2014; the 2018 Congress took place in Rio de Janeiro on August 1–9, 2018. The organizing committees of the early ICMs were formed in large part on an ad hoc basis and there was no single body continuously overseeing the ICMs. Following the end of World War I, the Allied Powers established in 1919 in Brussels the International Research Council. At the IRC's instructions, in 1920 the Union Mathematique Internationale was created; this was the immediate predecessor of the current International Mathematical Union. Under the IRC's pressure, UMI reassigned the 1920 congress from Stockholm to Strasbourg and insisted on the rule which excluded from the congress mathematicians representing the former Central Powers.
The exclusion rule, which applied to the 1924 ICM, turned out to be quite unpopular among mathematicians from the U. S. and Great Britain. The 1924 ICM was scheduled to be held in New York, but had to be moved to Toronto after the American Mathematical Society withdrew its invitation to host the congress, in protest against the exclusion rule; as a result of the exclusion rule and the protests it generated, the 1920 and the 1924 ICMs were smaller than the previous ones. In the run-up to the 1928 ICM in Bologna, IRC and UMI still insisted on applying the exclusion rule. In the face of the protests against the exclusion rule and the possibility of a boycott of the congress by the American Mathematical Society and the London Mathematical Society, the congress's organizers decided to hold the 1928 ICM under the auspices of the University of Bologna rather than of the UMI; the 1928 congress and all the subsequent congresses have been open for participation by mathematicians of all countries. The statutes of the UMI expired in 1931 and at the 1932 ICM in Zurich a decision to dissolve the UMI was made in opposition to IRC's pressure on the UMI.
At the 1950 ICM the participants voted to reconstitute the International Mathematical Union, formally established in 1951. Starting with the 1954 congress
Göttingen
Göttingen is a university city in Lower Saxony, the capital of the eponymous district. It is run through by River Leine. At the start of 2017, the population was 134,212; the origins of Göttingen lay in a village called Gutingi, first mentioned in a document in 953 AD. The city was founded northwest of this village, between 1150 and 1200 AD, adopted its name. In medieval times the city was a member of hence a wealthy town. Today, Göttingen is famous for its old university, founded in 1734 and became the most visited university of Europe. In 1837, seven professors protested against the absolute sovereignty of the kings of Hanover, its alumni include some well-known historical figures: the Brothers Grimm, Heinrich Ewald, Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Georg Gervinus. German Chancellors Otto von Bismarck and Gerhard Schröder attended law school at the Göttingen University. Karl Barth held his first professorship here; some of the most famous mathematicians in history, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann and David Hilbert, were professors at Göttingen.
Like other university towns, Göttingen has developed its own quaint traditions. On the day they are awarded their doctorate degrees, students are drawn in handcarts from the Great Hall to the Gänseliesel-Fountain in front of the Old Town Hall. There they have to kiss the statue of the Gänseliesel; this practice is forbidden, but the law is not enforced. She is considered the most kissed girl in the world. Nearly untouched by Allied bombing in World War II, the inner city of Göttingen is now an attractive place to live with many shops and bars. For this reason, many university students give Göttingen a youthful feel. In 2003, 45 % of the inner city population was only between 30 years of age. Commercially, Göttingen is noted for its production of optical and precision-engineered machinery, being the seat of the light microscopy division of Carl Zeiss, Inc. and a main site for Sartorius AG which specialises in bio-technology and measurement equipment—the region around Göttingen advertises itself as "Measurement Valley".
Unemployment in Göttingen was 12.6% in 2003 and is now 7%. The city's railway station to the west of the city centre is on Germany's main north-south railway. Göttingen has two professional basketball teams. For the 2007-08 season, both teams will play in the 1st division; the origins of Göttingen can be traced back to a village named Gutingi to the immediate south-east of the eventual city. The name of the village derives from a small stream, called the Gote, that once flowed through it. Since the ending -ing denoted "living by", the name can be understood as "along the Gote". Archaeological evidence points towards a settlement as early as the 7th century, it is first mentioned in a document by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I in 953 AD, in which the emperor gives some of his belongings in the village to the Moritz monastery in Magdeburg. Archaeological findings point to extensive commercial relations with other regions and a developed craftsmanship in this early period. In its early days, Gutingi was overshadowed by Grona documented from the year 915 AD as a newly built fortress, lying opposite Gutingi on a hill west of the River Leine.
It was subsequently used as an Ottonian imperial palace, with 18 visits of kings and emperors documented between 941 and 1025 AD. The last Holy Roman Emperor to use the fortress of Grona, Heinrich II had a church built in the neighbouring Gutingi, dedicated to Saint Alban; the current church building that occupies this site, the St. Albani Church, was built in 1423; the fortress lost its function as a palace in 1025, after Heinrich II died there, having retreated to it in ill health. It was subsequently used by the lords of Grone; the fortress was destroyed by the citizens of Göttingen between 1323 and 1329, razed to the ground by Duke Otto I during his feuds with the city of Göttingen in 1387. With time, a trading settlement started to form at the river crossing of the Leine to the west of the village, from which it took its name, it is this settlement, given city rights. The original village remained recognisable as a separate entity until about 1360, at which time it was incorporated within the town's fortification.
It is the present city was founded between 1150 and 1180, although the exact circumstances are not known. It is presumed that Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, founded the city; the configuration of the streets in the oldest part of the town is in the shape of a pentagon, it has been proposed that the inception of the town followed a planned design. At this time, the town was known by the name Gudingin or Gotingen, its inhabitants obeyed welfish ownership and ruling rights, the first Göttingen burghers are mentioned, indicating that Göttingen was organised as a true city. It was not, however, a Free Imperial City, but subject to the Welf dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Henry the Elder of Brunswick, eldest son of Henry the Lion and brother of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, is given as the lord over Göttingen between 1201 and 1208; the original Welf residency in the town consisted of a farm building and the stables of the Welf dukes, which occupied the oldest part of the city's fortifications built prior to 1250.
In its early days, Göttingen became involved in the conflicts of t
West Germany
West Germany the Federal Republic of Germany, referred to by historians as the Bonn Republic, was a country in Central Europe that existed from 1949 to 1990, when the western portion of Germany was part of the Western bloc during the Cold War. It was created during the Allied occupation of Germany in 1949 after World War II, established from eleven states formed in the three Allied zones of occupation held by the United States, the United Kingdom and France, its capital was the city of Bonn. At the onset of the Cold War, Europe was divided among the Eastern blocs. Germany was de facto divided into two countries and two special territories, the Saarland and divided Berlin; the Federal Republic of Germany claimed an exclusive mandate for all of Germany, considering itself to be the democratically reorganised continuation of the 1871–1945 German Empire. It took the line. Though the GDR did hold regular elections, these were not fair. From the West German perspective, the GDR was therefore illegitimate.
Three southwestern states of West Germany merged to form Baden-Württemberg in 1952, the Saarland joined the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957. In addition to the resulting ten states, West Berlin was considered an unofficial de facto 11th state. While not part of the Federal Republic of Germany, as Berlin was under the control of the Allied Control Council, West Berlin politically-aligned itself with West Germany and was represented in its federal institutions; the foundation for the influential position held by Germany today was laid during the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s when West Germany rose from the enormous destruction wrought by World War II to become the world's third-largest economy. The first chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who remained in office until 1963, had worked for a full alignment with NATO rather than neutrality, he not only secured a membership in NATO but was a proponent of agreements that developed into the present-day European Union. When the G6 was established in 1975, there was no question whether the Federal Republic of Germany would be a member as well.
Following the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, symbolised by the opening of the Berlin Wall, there was a rapid move towards German reunification. East Germany voted to dissolve itself and accede to the Federal Republic in 1990, its five post-war states were reconstituted along with the reunited Berlin, which ended its special status and formed an additional Land. They formally joined the Federal Republic on 3 October 1990, raising the number of states from 10 to 16, ending the division of Germany; the reunion did not result in a brand-new country. The expanded Federal Republic retained West Germany's political culture and continued its existing memberships in international organisations, as well as its Western foreign policy alignment and affiliation to Western alliances like UN, NATO, OECD and the European Union; the official name of West Germany, adopted in 1949 and unchanged since is Bundesrepublik Deutschland. In East Germany, the terms Westdeutschland or westdeutsche Bundesrepublik were preferred during the 1950s and 1960s.
This changed once under its 1968 constitution, when the idea of a single German nation was abandoned by East Germany, as a result West Germans and West Berliners were considered foreigners. In the early 1970s, starting in the East German Neues Deutschland, the initialism "BRD" for the "Federal Republic of Germany" began to prevail in East German usage. In 1973, official East German sources adopted it as a standard expression and other Eastern Bloc nations soon followed suit. In reaction to this move, in 1965 the West German Federal Minister of All-German Affairs Erich Mende issued the Directives for the appellation of Germany, recommending avoiding the initialism. On 31 May 1974, the heads of West German federal and state governments recommended always using the full name in official publications. From on West German sources avoided the abbreviated form, with the exception of left-leaning organizations which embraced it. In November 1979 the federal government informed the Bundestag that the West German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF had agreed to refuse to use the initialism.
The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code of West Germany was "DE", which has remained the country code of Germany after reunification. ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 are the most used country codes, the "DE" code is notably used as country identifier extending the postal code and as the Internet's country code top-level domain.de. Accordingly the less used ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code of West Germany was "DEU", which has remained the country code of reunified Germany; the now deleted codes for East Germany, on the other hand, was "DD" in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and "DDR" in ISO 3166-1 alpha-3. The colloquial term "West Germany" or its equivalent was used in many languages. "Westdeutschland" was a widespread colloquial form used in German-speaking countries without political overtones. On 4–11 February 1945 leaders from the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union held the Yalta Conference where future arrangements as regards post-war Europe and strategy against Japan in the Pacific were negotiated.
The conference agreed that post-war Germany would be divided into four occupation zones: a French Zone in the far west.
