A Mathematical Tour of the Princeton Cemetery

Compiled by Doron Zeilberger (First Posted Dec. 31, 2014)

This vesion: Aug. 12, 2023 . Thanks (again) to Timothy Y. Chow.

Previous versions: May 2, 2018 [Thanks to additional pictures taken by Yukun Yao]; May 26, 2019 [Thanks to additional pictures taken by Jane Legrange]; July 8, 2023. Thanks to Timothy Y. Chow. July 21, 2023. Thanks (again) to Timothy Y. Chow.

I am lucky to live in Princeton, who has its share of living geniuses. But their genius dwarfs in comparison to the quantity (and quality!) of dead geniuses most of whom (but not the greatest of them all, dear Albert) are buried in the Princeton Cemetery (website).

The official VIP list, issued by the cemetery, contains the following names. Each name is followed by the coordinates [Letter-Number] in p.3 of this map

• John N. Bahcall [E-15]
  [here are pictures of the front and back]

• Kurt Gödel [Y-25] who wrote this seminal paper [related work was done by Alan Turing, made short and sweet here]

  [here is a picture of his and his wife Adele's grave, and here is a picture of his mother-in-law's grave, designed by Adele]

• Solomon Lefschetz [D-5]

• John von Neumann [X-26] [here is a picture of his and his mother's grave]

• Eugene Paul Wigner [X-32] who raved about the The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences

But there are many other geniuses not mentioned there

• Leonard Baum [appx. E-28] [see here]

• Felix Browder [appx. W-20] [see here]

• Alonzo Church [appx. Y-27] [see here]

• Peter L. Hammer [appx. J-20], who taught me about pseudo-Boolean functions when I was 18 (and he was 32). His gravestone has the inscription: "He belonged to a family loved by the synagogue"
  Here is a picture of his grave.
  [[here is a picture of the place-holder for his grave, taken in 2006]]

• Aaron Lemonick [appx. N-33]

• Steven Orszag [appx. Y-28], a close collaborator of my dear late friend Isaac Goldhirsch

• David Peter Robbins (1942-2003) [B-28] (not far from the gate that borders Witherspoon St.) [here is a picture of his beautiful grave, and here is a close-up depicting three copies of an example of a totally-symmetric-self-complimentary-plane partition that he (along with W.H. Mills and H. Rumsey) conjectured are enumerated by the Robbins numbers. This conjecture was proved by George Andrews, and I used the latter result to give the first proof of another conjecture of Mills-Robbins-Rumsey, called the Alternating Sign Matrix conjecture
  See also this nice article.

• Herbert Robbins [ appx. M-32], the PhD advisor of my dear late friend and collaborator Herbert S. Wilf, and the co-author (with Richard Courant) of the classic What is Mathematics
  Here is a picture of his grave.

• John Tukey [appx. H-2, visible from Wiggins Street, right next to the fence], of FFT fame
  Here is a picture of his grave.

• Elias Stein [appx. I-23]

• Andre Weil [appx. R-30] [see here]

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