ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The growing authority of nineteenth and twentieth-century mathematics is often narrated alongside a growing trust in numbers. However, recent scholarship has emphasized that both bureaucrats and scientists often valued mathematization itself over the numbers such work produced. The papers in this panel explore this culture of mathematization by focusing on the exchange of equations. Each talk traces a case of mathematical circulation, when an equation, or its material representation, mediated the exchange of knowledge between groups as diverse as mathematicians, designers, natural scientists, industrialists, anti-war activists, or stock traders. By highlighting mathematization broadly rather than quantification, the papers in this panel ask: How did scientists and mathematicians use their equations to wield authority outside of their own disciplines? How did mathematical exchange serve as a conduit for philosophical, epistemic, and social transfer? And how might we understand equations beyond their capacity to produce numbers? In centering formalization itself rather than the quantities such methodologies produced, this panel aims to bridge dialogue between the history of mathematics, museum studies, and the history of political economy.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Kevin Lambert, California State University, Fullerton

Individual Presentations

• A Museum Exhibit Beyond the World of Numbers: Mathematica from Charles and Ray Eames, 1961 - Andrew Fiss, Michigan Technological University

• Measuring Coastlines from Anti-War Research to Fractal Geometry - Abigail Alling Taylor-Roth, University of Chicago

• Equations Embodied: Models of Thermodynamic Surfaces and the Circulation of Knowledge - Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Smithsonian

• Mathematical Metaphors and the Birth of American Complexity Science - Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan, Yale University

Session Organizers

• Abigail Alling Taylor-Roth, University of Chicago

• Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan, Yale University