Mathematical Communities in the Reconstruction After the Great War 1918-1928: Trajectories and Institutions

ISBN-13: 9783030616854 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 380 str.

Mazliak, Laurent

Opis

This book is a consequence of the international meeting organized in Marseilles in November 2018 devoted to the aftermath of the Great War for mathematical communities. It features selected original research presented at the meeting offering a new perspective on a period, the 1920s, not extensively considered by historiography.

After 1918, new countries were created, and borders of several others were modified. Territories were annexed while some countries lost entire regions. These territorial changes bear witness to the massive and varied upheavals with which European societies were confronted in the aftermath of the Great War. The reconfiguration of political Europe was accompanied by new alliances and a redistribution of trade – commercial, intellectual, artistic, military, and so on – which largely shaped international life during the interwar period. These changes also had an enormous impact on scientific life, not only in practice, but also in its organization and communication strategies.

The mathematical sciences, which from the late 19th century to the 1920s experienced a deep disciplinary evolution, were thus facing a double movement, internal and external, which led to a sustainable restructuring of research and teaching. Concomitantly, various areas such as topology, functional analysis, abstract algebra, logic or probability, among others, experienced exceptional development. This was accompanied by an explosion of new international or national associations of mathematicians with for instance the founding, in 1918, of the International Mathematical Union and the controversial creation of the International Research Council. Therefore, the central idea for the articulation of the various chapters of the book is to present case studies illustrating how in the aftermath of the war, many mathematicians had to organize their personal trajectories taking into account the evolution of the political, social and scientific environment which had taken place at the end of the conflict.

Spis treści

Introduction.- William Henry Young, an unconventional President of the International Mathematical Union.- The Unione Matematica Italiana and its Bollettino, 1922-1928. National and International Aspects.- L'Enseignement mathématique and its internationalist ambitions during the turmoil of WWI and the 1920s.- Mathematics and logic in Polish encyclopedias published during the interwar period.- From the war against errors to mathematics after the war: Public discourses on a new mathematical dictionary.- International geodesy in the post-war period, as seen by the French Bureau des longitudes (1917-1922).- “The first mathematically serious German school of applied mathematics”? Richard von Mises in the field of tension between pure and engineering mathematics in post-WWI Berlin.- The mathematics of nonlinear oscillations in the 1920s: a decade of trials and convergence? Examples of the work of Nicolai Minorsky.- From Fundamenta Mathematicae to Studia Mathematica: the renaissance of Polish mathematics in light of Banach’s publications 1919-1940.- The journeys of a Hungarian mathematician in the post-war world.- Russian emigrant mathematicians in interwar France: A general picture and two case studies of Ervand Kogbetliantz and Vladimir Kosticyn.