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The Rockefeller Fellows card file as evidence of international mathematics

Digitising and indexing the cards associated with 14,650 awards from the Rockefeller Foundation between 1921 and 1971 deserves our applause. These cards served as the index to the various foundation files for a critical period of grant making that those working at the foundation would use in their everyday business of administering, awarding, and evaluating grants. As a foundation with a international reach, these records document the world changing. I wondered, what can they tell us about international mathematics?

The foundation archives store these cards by country, the name of which in the database is called “benefiting country”, and then by the name of the fellow. The headline on most of the physical cards is this benefiting country and drawer which–for the most part–reflects the home from which a fellow would travel. The grants, then, describe a temporary move. A fellow permanently, as some cards describe it, lives in one place, but goes temporarily to another place to study. These travels seem likely to describe the international centers in various decades, which they indeed do. Consider the two maps below, one for 1921 to 1930 and another from 1930 to 1945.

Places to which mathematical fellows travelled from 1921 to 1930:

The first map uses size to show how many fellows travelled to that location. Thus we can see that Paris, Göttingen, and Rome, followed by Chicago, Princeton, Cambridge (US), Munich, and Amsterdam, received the most fellows on a visit. The colour in the map represents how many fellows travelled from that place, the darker means there were more fellows. Thus Both Göttingen and Paris saw many fellows travelling from there as well as to there. Princeton and Rome saw similar numbers of fellows travelling from there and Cambridge (US), Cambridge (UK), and Hamburg closely followed.

This map probably does not surprise anyone based on the received histories of international mathematics. All of these were major centres. But the second map highlights some peculiarities.

Places to which mathematical fellows travelled from 1930 to 1945:

The sizes and colours follow the same approach as above, so we can immediately see that Princeton has come to dominate the number of fellows received. Similarly, Ann Arbour and Chicago have both grown. New York, too, appears to be a place to visit for fellow. Paris and Göttingen, however, have nearly disappeared.

The colours tell another story too. The lines on both graphs represent a fellow travelling from one place to another. On the first graph, the dark Paris and Göttingen seem to host a number of exchanges with the core. Princeton, Rome, Göttingen, and Paris seem to exchange fellows back and forth. On this new graph, no major places to visit are directly connected. Every other major centre is connected by a smaller place–small here meaning that it doesn’t host many fellows.

This seems to suggest a shift around 1930 from exchanging fellows between centres in Europe and the US, to a system where fellows coming from all over the world are brought to centres in the US or Rome.

If there analysis ended here, this might seem to be a story about where mathematics is being done, where the intellectual centres of activity are, and who dominates the landscape in this period. The analysis, however, deliberately obscures the nature of the index data. Consider a typical card, like the below for Alexander Weinstein.

The cover card for Alexander Weinstein’s records:

Weinstein was born in Saratov, Russia but his family emigrated to Germany early on. After graduating from Göttingen, Weinstein moved to Zürich, Switzerland, which is where he was when he received his Rockefeller Fellowship. The card seems to index this story, but most of it was added after the card was initially produced.

The mathematics cards seem to have been produced when the fellow received the award with more details added later. Here we can see that the card initially did not record Weinstein’s age or place of birth, but his permanent address. The first typing regime, which can be distinguished by the shade of ink as well as the shape of the capital letter ‘A’ describes his name and proposer. Later on, specific dates and countries were added. Look, in particular, at the cross bar of the capital ‘A’ in Russia, Switzerland, and Alexander. The first typing event, in the lighter ink, has a lower cross bar, but the darker and later event has a slightly higher bar indicating a different typewriter was used. Notice too that the fellowship year is typed in the lighter ink, but both countries in darker ink and out of line. This card would appear to have been initially organised by fellowship year, but later by country. When it was organised by country, it was initially as Switzerland or Russia, then for some period as both (perhaps even only a moment during revision), and later as just Switzerland.

Yet, at the foot, we also see the card being distinguished from the American geneticist and drosophila researcher of the same name. A later card in Weinstein’s file shows the moment of confusion, where it’s not clear if the mathematician Weinstein studied biology at Johns Hopkins or not.

A later card for Alexander Weinstein’s records:

By the 1950’s Weinstein had immigrated to the United States, though the card still preserves his benefiting country as Switzerland. Whatever administrative activity had come up, someone had confused him with another American, leading to the wrong fact on this card that is noted on the cover to prevent further confusion.

What this demonstrates is that the Rockefeller Foundation itself was deeply concerned with countries of origin, even where a country of origin does not make a lot of sense for the individual. The additions of the filing country on the headline appear around the 1930s, which is why the maps above were divided by that year. Rather than showing a change in international history, then, those maps show a change of the foundation’s understanding of its own task. They began to refile cards to recognise a change in how they were approaching awarding grants, an internal change rather than an external one.

Thus the closing map, the home—permanent—benefiting location of maths fellows from 1930-1945 shows who the foundation was bringing to the US, Rome, or Cambridge. The size here indicates the number of fellows sent and the colour red indicates very few received, whereas blue indicates comparatively more fellows received.

Fellows leaving from 1930 to 1945:

Here we can see large numbers of fellows going from Paris to Rome or Berlin, Göttingen to Rome, or between Princeton and Cambridge (UK). Most of the fellows going to Ann Arbor, New York, or Chicago were in the United States already, although there are a significant number going from Frankfurt am Main to Chicago. Princeton, Rome, and Cambridge (US) seem to receive the most fellows. This does not reflect the post-1930 structure of knowledge, but the way that the Rockefeller Foundation was imagining the social community of mathematics should function after 1930. For them, there seem to be three international centres, Princeton, Paris, and Cambridge (US), whereas every other centre seems to be closer to regional.