Helmut Hasse - Emil Artin
Our book with the correspondence Hasse-Artin contains the letters from Artin to Hasse only. The letters from Hasse to Artin seemed to be lost. However in 2009 we have found one letter from Hasse to Artin in the archives of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. We found it among the papers of the late Olga Taussky-Todd. The letter (written in German) is dated November 8, 1932. It appears that Artin had handed over this letter to Olga Taussky. The letter deals with simplifications of certain proofs for class field theory, in conjunction with Artin's Göttingen lecture which took place from February29 to March 2, 1932. That lecture has been said to have been "pioneering" since it provided a great simplification of class field theory, thus opening a new approach to the subject. Olga Taussky and also Hasse had attended the lecture. In his letter Hasse pointed out some further simplifications. Since Olga Taussky had taken notes of Artin's lecture and was preparing those notes for distribution, it is understandable that Artin handed the letter to her for further action. But it appears that the ideas of Hasse's letter had not found their way into Taussky's notes. Perhaps it was too late and the notes were already finished.. These notes were not printed but typed. Copies were distributed to interested people. It was in 1978 only when the notes finally appeared in print (at Springer), as an appendix to the book by Harvey Cohn "A Classical Invitation to Algebraic Numbers and Class Fields". Hasse's letter to Artin was accompanied, within the papers of Olga Taussky, by an undated manuscript from Hasse containing a new proof of the so-called inversion theorem of class field theory (Umkehrsatz). Compare with Hasse's notes of his Marburg lecture in the summer of 1932. Those notes too were not printed but copies of the typed manuscript were distributed. In 1967 the Hasse notes appeared in print at the Physica Verlag, Würzbutg.
Hasse's letter and manuscript: pdf dvi