Paul Peter Ewald, FRS (January 23, 1888 in Berlin, Germany – August 22, 1985 in Ithaca, New York) was a German crystallographer and physicist, a pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods. Education Ewald received his early education in the classics at the Gymnasium in Berlin and Potsdam, where he learned to speak Greek, French, and English, in addition to his native German. Ewald began his higher education in physics, chemistry, and mathematics at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, during the winter of 1905. In 1906 and 1907, he continued his formal education at the University of Göttingen, where his interests turned primarily to mathematics. At that time, Göttingen was a world-class center of mathematics under the three “Mandarins” of Göttingen: Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski. While studying at Göttingen, Ewald was taken on by Hilbert as an Ausarbeiter, a paid position as a scribe, i.e. he would take notes in Hilbert’s classes, have the notes approved by Hilbert’s assistant — at that time, Ernst Hellinger — and then prepare a clean copy for the Lesezimmer — the mathematics reading room. In 1907, he continued his mathematical studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), under Arnold Sommerfeld at his Institute for Theoretical Physics. He was granted his doctorate in 1912. His doctoral thesis developed the laws of propagation of X-rays in single crystals. After earning his doctorate, he was an assistant to Sommerfeld. During the 1911 Christmas recess and in January 1912, Ewald was finishing the writing of his doctoral thesis. It was on a walk through Englischer Garten in Munich, in January, that Ewald was telling Max von Laue about his thesis topic. The wavelengths of concern to Ewald were in the visible region of the spectrum and hence much larger than the spacing between the resonators in Ewald’s crystal model. Laue seemed distracted and wanted to know what would be the effect if much smaller wavelengths were considered. It was not until June of that year that Ewald heard Sommerfeld report to the Physikalische Gesellschaft of Göttingen on the successful diffraction of X-rays by Max von Laue, Paul Knipping and Walter Friedrich at LMU, for which Laue would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1914. With the rise of theoretical physics in the early part of the twentieth century and its foundation in mathematics, David Hilbert decided to lend an organizing hand to