I made a trip to Princeton and met with Veblen, who was then running the Institute. "What," asked I, "are the duties of an assistant to Professor von Neumann?" Veblen answered with a mixture of surprise and disdain, that a mere private second class should ask such a question about a four star general. His answer staggered me. Here were the four principal duties of von Neumann's assistant:
1. To attend von Neumann's lectures on operator theory on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, take copious notes, complete unfinished proofs, see them through the secretarial jungle, and promptly circulate them to all American university libraries. This task alone was consuming the entire energies of a younger person, who had to be not only well-meaning but sharp, fast, clever, and tough. These notes ran to over 600 pages.
2. To be von Neumann's assistant as Editor of the Annals of Mathematics. This meant reading through every manuscript accepted for publication, underlining Greek letters in red and German letters in green, and circling italics. Also writing in the margins all necessary instructions to printers. The following anecdote illustrates the hazards of being editorial assistant of the Annals in the early thirties. A manuscript was submitted by the brilliant Soviet mathematician, Lev Pontryagin. Since paper was then exceptionally scarce in the Soviet Union, Pontryagin had taken wrapping paper, torn it into appropriate-sized pieces, and gone to work on his typewriter. Unfortunately, Pontryagin was blind. The wrapping paper was torn unevenly, and a good portion of the words and symbols in the margins were missing. No matter. The Annals editorial assistant retyped the paper, supplying all the missing symbols. What a hero!
3. To go once a week to the printers of the Annals of Mathematics in Baltimore in order to instruct them in the art of typesetting mathematical symbols with subscripts, superscripts, subsubscripts, etc. The Annals of Mathematics had been printed in Hamburg, Germany by the firm of Liitke and Wolk. In view of increasing anti-Semitism under Hitler, the German connection was given up in favor of printing in the United States. But no American printer had ever before set up mathematical symbols! They were complete illiterates. Solution: let von Neumann's assistant teach them!
4. To translate into English von Neumann's numerous 100-page papers. Now that von Neumann was a professor in an American institute, it was thought that his papers should appear in English, not German. Since von Neumann was provided with an assistant, it was natural that the assistant should do this.
Items three and four were on the table for the first time. The first two had somehow been handled by the previous assistant. I left my meeting with Veblen in a downcast mood. Here I had the opportunity to work next to the most brilliant mathematician of his generation. But the job entailed such onerous duties that only someone with an iron constitution could survive. My constitution, it so happened, was not made of iron. It was made of reeds and bamboo sticks, very satisfactory under moderate pressures, but completely incapable of standing a huge overload. But what choice had I?
...
I wrote to von Neumann and Veblen, explaining that my nervous constitution would not allow me to perform adequately the duties of Von Neumann's assistant. (I heard subsequently that the position that had been offered to me was divided into four pieces. Heaven knows, each quarter was substantial enough.)