Schrödinger's paper (1926) on Bose–Einstein condensation was submitted for publication on 15 December, 1925, immediately preceding the first of his papers on wave mechanics. Historians of science (Hanle, 1977; Klein, 1964) have seen ‘an organic connection’ between the two. It came between the three papers of Einstein (1924, 1925a, b) on the boson gas and Uhlenbeck's doctoral thesis (Uhlenbeck, 1927), and did not receive the attention it deserved, although, with hindsight, it is seen to contain the gem of the idea which was later to resolve the conflict between Einstein and Uhlenbeck. Einstein based his prediction (Einstein, 1925a) of condensation in the free boson gas on a combination of Bose–Einstein statistics and the classical density of states in phase-space; this leads to an expression for the mean particle number density as a function of kinetic energy which saturates as the total density increases so that there is a maximum possible density of particles having nonzero kinetic energy. Einstein claimed that, if the particle density is increased above this maximum, the excess goes into a state with zero kinetic energy. This is the phenomenon of condensation. Uhlenbeck (1927) objected that the result holds only ‘when the quantization of translational motion is neglected’. The situation remained unclear until the Amsterdam meeting to celebrate the centenary (23 November 1937) of the birth of Johannes van der Waals; here Kramers pointed out the importance of the thermodynamic limit for the sharp manifestatioon of phase transitions.