This award is a doctoral dissertation improvement grant. It supports a project in the history of mathematics specifically focusing on the first few decades of the twentieth century, a period of deep change in mathematics. That period has come to be defined by the concept of "mathematical modernism," designating the beginning of a formal, abstract approach to mathematics, an approach that led to the discipline's increasing autonomy and professionalization. It informs the conventional view that the trajectory of mathematical modernism is separate from parallel transformational developments in the arts and architecture during this time. By contrast, this project will bring to light a set of interconnections between mathematical modernism and other modernist transformations in the arts. It will provide a new perspective from which to understand the varied contexts in which mathematical practice takes place. The results of this project will interest STS scholars, historians of mathematics and science, and other scholars of modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history, including art historians. They will be disseminated as a scholarly book and research articles. More broadly, the project will contribute to on-going discussions about education policy and science communication by examining little-known approaches to mathematical education. It will also promote the development of research infrastructure among mathematicians and artists by focusing on productive exchanges between artists and mathematicians,
This project examines the exchanges American mathematicians had with philosophical, artistic, and aesthetic notions of modernism between 1920 and 1960 in order to understand what constituted mathematical practice and how mathematicians understood their vocation in relation to artists. It will historicize the naturalistic conception of "mathematical modernism" that mathematicians and historians often draw upon by engaging the history of mathematics with previously neglected scholarship, particularly the history of art and US intellectual history. It will also problematize histories of modern disciplines by calling into question such binaries as pure vs. applied mathematics and the arts vs. sciences. It will reveal how mathematicians, artists, and other communities of practice remained in constant and unpredictable communication with each other, and thereby lead to a rethinking of established narratives of modernism, disciplinary formation, and the history of mathematics. Modernism then will be regarded as the attempt to move beyond formal and institutional structures and dissolve disciplinary boundaries. Recovering this history has crucial implications for changing how we view mathematical practice, the intellectual organization of disciplines in the American Academy, and the classification of mathematical knowledge itself.
