ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Between Necessity and Interest: The Expansion of the Mathematical Community in the United States, 1945-1991.

• In Event: Transformations of Mathematics in the 20th Century

English Abstract

To what extent was mathematics in the Cold War US molded by institutional and disciplinary evolution? My dissertation project aims to examine how political priorities, funding structures, and ideological pressures reshaped the Mathematical Community as an institutional entity. Drawing on quantitative data from the NSF’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, the Notices of the AMS, and the Mathematics Genealogy Project, the study reconstructs quantitatively the expansion and differentiation of mathematics between 1945 and 1991. By tracing more than 31,000 conferred PhDs and classifying their field of graduation through the Mathematics Subject Classification, it reveals how subdisciplines emerged, declined, or reoriented under changing institutional conditions.
The project interprets the postwar history of mathematics as a pattern of transformation: between military and civilian priorities and between expanding and splitting fields, and between the ideals of academic autonomy and the realities of federal patronage. Applying concepts from Historical Institutionalism serves to identify how critical junctures such as World War II or the Sputnik shock produced new layers of practice and meaning within the discipline, marking durable transformations in the structure of mathematical research and education.
By quantifying these institutional and intellectual shifts, the project offers one of the first data-driven reconstructions of the Mathematical Community’s internal evolution. In this talk, I will present the results of the quantitative analysis, highlighting the differentiation and expansion of the mathematical subdisciplines, while using grant and federal funding data to exemplify the shifts in mathematics.

Author

• Lukas Alexander Schievelbusch, University of Wuppertal