Institutions

The project theme examines the institutional conditions and contexts of modern international and global mathematics. Modern mathematics has depended on an especially wide range of institutions to support careers, training, publishing, travel, and other professional and scholarly objectives. The social and epistemic consequences of this dependence, moreover, can be difficult to grasp at the level of individual institutions. Historians in the last three decades have shed substantial new light on these institutions, including funders, research institutes, and national and international organizations. SIGMA will develop an integrated global perspective on the institutions of modern mathematics that accounts for what these institutions meant for participants in the global profession whose stories and experiences are easy to miss from the perspective of any single institution or archive. We ask why mathematicians pursued global research communities, how they came to imagine their subject as capable of sustaining (or even requiring) communities on that scale, and how they produced the institutions necessary for pursuing these goals in wider scientific, geopolitical, social, economic, and other contexts.

Infrastructures

This project theme focuses on the infrastructures of global mathematics, including a rapidly changing periodical literature and a connected and also rapidly changing apparatus of funding for research, conferences, and travel. Mathematical researchers today travel and work in environments saturated with preprints, internet forum comments, seminar videos, and other media transmitted around the world. They urgently track developments from far-away lands, cite results from names they may not know how to pronounce, and expect their own work to be tractable to people they may never meet. Mundane ideas get lost and monumental breakthroughs gain traction in global networks that can destabilize established orders even as they amplify inequalities. These features of global mathematics are much newer and more contingent than one might assume.

Implications

This project theme develops the implications of the project’s analyses of global mathematics for historical and sociological accounts of evaluation, equity, inclusion, participation, ethics, and education in the mathematics profession in the past, present, and future. It asks how the advent of global mathematics altered patterns, conditions, and opportunity structures of participation and prestige in the discipline. The history of global mathematics continues to shape the mathematics profession in profound ways that are often difficult to recognize, affecting career pathways, funding infrastructures, power and recognition, and relationships among organizations and communities at multiple scales. Demographic and geographic inequalities in mathematics training, employment, and prizes are qualitatively and quantitatively undeniable and significant, and have been studied both within mathematics and as part of wider accounts of the sciences. While particular biases and stereotypes may seem endemic to mathematics, recent research has proposed more recent and contingent origins for some of the most intractable-seeming assumptions about mathematical personae, rooted in the global history explored in the project. Mathematicians’ institutional and infrastructural means of confronting (or sidestepping) legacies of racial and political discrimination, too, have a recent history tightly linked to the planned work.