ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Mathematical Metaphors and the Birth of American Complexity Science

• In Event: Mathematics in Motion: Equations as Mediators for the Circulation of Knowledge

English Abstract

At one of the first conferences for the brand-new Santa Fe Institute for the Complex Sciences, physicist David Pines looked out on his colleagues—a collection of mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, biologists, archaeologists, and economists—and gave them a new moniker, “spin-glass freaks.” He meant this playfully, an homage to the fact that this wide-ranging disciplinary group could be brought together by their love for one equation, the Hamiltonian for a spin-glass system. This talk explores the history of this equation to understand how mathematicians and physicists circulated their formalism in order to build common ground between fields and court new sources of private funding in the 1980s. I will examine how these figures pursued the work of “mathematical metaphor,” whereby they made dissimilar objects of study, like crystal lattices and economic behavior, alike by arguing for their formal similarity. In doing so, the spin-glass Hamiltonian came to mediate philosophical, aesthetic, and epistemological exchange even as complexity scientists admitted that their models usually failed at empirical comparison with the world.

Author

• Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan, Yale University