Subject: Re: [HM] Emmy Noether at Penn?
From: Thomas L Bartlow (thomas.bartlow@villanova.edu)
Date: Mon Feb 14 2000 - 15:26:58 EST
Regarding train lines connecting Bryn Mawr, Philadelphia and Princeton,
I live and work in this area and know the current system. I suspect, but
do not know that it was similar in the 1930's.
Princeton is northeast of Philadelphia and can be reached from Amtrak
service between Philadelphia and New York. The campus of U. of
Pennsylvania is an easy walk from Amtrak's 30th Street station. Amtrak
also runs service west from Philadelphia to Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.
These trains do not stop at Bryn Mawr. There is also a commuter train
running west and stopping at Bryn Mawr. It uses the same tracks and same
stations as Amtrak but makes more frequent stops. Today this service is
run by Septa (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority). In
the 1930's I think both the inter-city service and the commuter service
were run by the Pennsylvania Railroad. There must surely be a way of
checking old schedules to learn exactly what service was offered then.
Even today it is easy to walk two blocks from the Bryn Mawr campus to
the station, board a commuter train for 30th Street. From there one
could walk 6 blocks to Penn or transfer to Amtrak bound for Princeton
and New York. I do not know what is involved in getting from the train
to the Princeton campus but surely a generation more accustomed to train
travel than ours would have found no difficulty traveling among these
campuses.
Jim Reeds wrote:
> Colin McLarty asked :
>
> > He, Freyd, wonders if some of these lectures were at Penn.
> > Of course Bryn Mawr is not so far from Philadelphia is not
> > so far from Bryn Mawr (and surely was on the train route
> > between Princeton and Bryn Mawr).
>
> If I parse the "Of course" sentence correctly, this asserts that as
> you ride from Princeton to Philadelphia by train, you pass Bryn
> Mawr. This does not square with my memory: which is that the
> train line Bryn Mawr is on, an east-west commuter route, is not the
> same as the line Princeton is on, a north-south intercity link.
> You have to change trains.
>
> May I offer a different explanation, based on my own linguistic
> experience? When I lived in Rosemont PA (across the street from
> Bryn Mawr, where my wife had a post-doc) we told our relatives and
> out-of-town friends that we lived in Philadelphia. This is not
> even a simplifying fib, as Bryn Mawr and so on are in the greater
> Philadelphia region, as the use of figurative language,
> "synedoche", where a term for the part refers to the whole, or for
> the whole refers to the part. (This is legal in English speech and
> letter writing.) Accordingly, "I'm taking a trip to Philadelphia"
> CAN mean "I'm taking a trip to Bryn Mawr".
>
> Of course I don't have a clue about the facts of where Noether
> lectured.
>
> --
> Jim Reeds, AT&T Labs - Research
> Shannon Laboratory, Room C229, Building 103
> 180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA
>
> reeds@research.att.com, phone: +1 973 360 8414, fax: +1 973 360 8178
Thomas L Bartlow
Assistant Professor
Department of Mathematical Sciences
Villanova University
800 Lancaster Avenue
Villanova PA 19085
fax: 610-519-6928
work: 610-519-7331
http://www66.homepage.villanova.edu/thomas.bartlow
Thomas.Bartlow@villanova.edu
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