formalizing the sciences, starting with physics. In 1912, Hilbert asked his friend and colleague Arnold Sommerfeld to send him a special assistant for physics. Sommerfeld sent Ewald, who was dubbed as “Hilbert’s tutor for physics”, and he performed this function until 1913, when Sommerfeld sent another one of his students, Alfred Landé. The first problem assigned to Ewald was to review the controversy in the literature on the constants of elasticity in crystals and report back. A few years later, Max Born, at Göttingen, solved the problem. During Ewald’s stay in Göttingen, he was often a visitor at El BoKaReBo, a boarding house run by Sister Annie at Dahlmannstrasse 17. The name was derived from the first letters of the last names of its boarders: “El” for Ella Philippson (a medical student), “Bo” for Max Born (a Privatdozent) and Hans Bolza (a physics student), “Ka” for Theodore von Kármán (a Privatdozent), and “Re” for Albrecht Renner (a medical student). Richard Courant, a mathematician and Privatdozent, called these people the “in group”. It was here that Ewald met Ella Philippson, who was to become his wife. In the spring of 1913, Niels Bohr, of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, submitted his theory of the Bohr atomic model for publication. Later that year, Ewald attended the Birmingham meeting of the British Association where he heard accounts and discussions of James Jeans’ review on radiation theory and Bohr’s model. This ignited a major new area of research for Sommerfeld and his students — the study and interpretation of atomic spectra and molecular band spectroscopy and theoretical modeling of atomic and molecular structure. During World War I, Ewald served in the German military as a medical technician. When he could, he continued to think about the physics of his doctoral thesis, and he developed the dynamical theory of X-ray diffraction, which he was later to use in his Habilitationsschrift. At the conclusion of the war, he returned to LMU as an assistant to Sommerfeld. He completed his Habilitation in 1917, and became a Privatdozent there, while remaining as an assistant to Sommerfeld. In 1921, while still at LMU, Ewald published a paper on the theta function method of analyzing dipole fields in crystals, an offshoot from his earlier work on the dynamical theory of optics and X-rays in crystals, which appeared in three journal publications. According to Ewald, the