Around 1990 a window of opportunity opened for establishing a new research institute in Austria at the interface of mathematics and physics. A rare constellation of international support, local initiative, and a favourable constellation of actors at the scientific and political levels succeeded in founding the Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Mathematical Physics as a publicly funded, but independently organized society (a “Verein” according to Austrian law).
From the speaker’s personal perspective and experience this talk intends to paint a picture of the foundational period of the ESI and the constellation of personal, structural and scientific circumstances which contributed to the fact that the ESI rapidly became a successful and internationally acknowledged hot spot in mathematics and mathematical physics.