l x v i I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 1 4 planned centennial memorial volume for Bernhard Riemann (Docs. 395, 397). Ein- stein asked Langevin to ascertain whether Painlevé would accept such an invitation or at least recommend other potential contributors (Doc. 398). A controversy erupt- ed among members of the editorial board, between those who supported the partic- ipation of French scientists and those who opposed it. Eventually, Blumenthal asked Einstein to inform Langevin that no official individual invitations would be extended to French, or to any other, scientists, but that contributions that were re- ceived by the journal would be published (Doc. 429). X Sometime in June 1924, a few weeks after his colloquium on the BKS theory, Ein- stein received a letter from a young, little-known Indian scholar, Satyendra Nath Bose (Doc. 261). Enclosed with the letter was a manuscript in which Bose gave the first statistical derivation of Planck’s radiation law on the basis of light quanta with- out invoking results that were derived on wave-theoretical assumptions. At the time, Bose was a thirty-year-old reader at the newly established Univer- sity of Dakha who had previously published a couple of papers in the Philosophical Magazine on the classical equation of state and on the quantum theory of Ryd- berg’s law. He had also been involved in the English translation of Lorentz et al. 1922, published by the University of Calcutta, and had translated, in particular, Einstein’s 1916 review paper on the general theory of relativity (Einstein 1916e [Vol. 6, Doc. 30]). Bose recalled that he first conceived of the idea for his paper while reflecting on how best to teach the new quantum and relativity physics in a logical and straight- forward manner, and without getting caught up in theoretical inconsistencies.[35] One such inconsistency, repeatedly lamented by Einstein and others, was that der- ivations of Planck’s radiation formula typically rested on two kinds of assumptions that were mutually incompatible. For example, in 1916 Einstein had praised Planck for his derivation, which was based on finding an expression for the mean energy of a resonator in a radiation field as a function of temperature, and then using the relation (*) to obtain the radiation density ρ as a function of frequency ν (c is the velocity of light). The success of Planck’s derivation indirectly confirmed the above relation, but Einstein was quick to add: “However, it remained unsatisfactory that the elec- E E c3ρ 8πν2 ------------ =