About the Project

Situating International and Global Mathematics (SIGMA) is a project based at the University of Edinburgh and funded by a UKRI Horizon backstop grant (adjudicated as an ERC Starting Grant) to study the global history of modern mathematics.

The project confronts the problems of scale and place in the epoch-making transformations of the last century of mathematics. The appearance of modern mathematics as placeless and borderless—open in principle to anyone, anywhere—is a product of profound shifts in mathematicians’ institutions and infrastructures and in the nature of mathematical research and knowledge. These conditions for the emergence of a globe-spanning mathematical discipline in the last century have, paradoxically, obscured the sheer magnitude of the difference between the global era of mathematics and what came before. Far from a universal and frictionless form of knowledge, mathematics has been especially shaped by the human dimensions of communication, cooperation, and conflict.

Today’s global mathematical discipline is recent, contingent, and precarious. Rather than future-proofing a discipline that one can imagine anywhere there are minds to think, the apparent universality of mathematics hides the discipline’s consequential dependence on resource-intensive and inequality-ramifying systems of travel and communication and the fragile basis of intellectual and disciplinary consensus on which mathematicians have come to rely since the middle of the last century. Long-brewing and interlinked crises of environmental, economic, and geopolitical change motivate the urgent need for new understandings of what makes the mathematics profession’s global integration imaginable, possible, challenging, and significant. The networks and economies that now connect so much of the world rely on historically new forms and scales of mathematical abstraction and theory-making, and redouble the stakes for who can be part of the global community of mathematicians and on what terms. Mathematics changes the world in ways and at scales whose comprehension demands new historical methods and perspectives.

Understanding the apparent universality of mathematics to be a hard-won, historically contingent, and always-partial ongoing enterprise makes the last century’s history of mathematical globalization all the more trenchant a historiographical challenge. International professional networks premised on the mobility of researchers and ideas had to conjure those premises into existence through enormous and often occluded expenditures of money and labor. The problem of scale in modern mathematics connects the discipline’s people and places to the knowledge they produce. A new reckoning with the situated achievement of global mathematics thus promises new perspectives on both the production of international and global research communities and the nature and conditions of mathematical knowledge as they transformed in tandem since the mid-twentieth century. Such a reckoning requires new methods for comprehending the geographical, linguistic, and institutional diversity of global mathematics, new frameworks for exploiting and examining the infrastructural and material substrates of the discipline, and new principles reconceiving the implications, assumptions, and inequities of mathematicians’ global history for critical engagement and analysis in the present.