Postdoctoral Fellowship: The Emergence and Consequences of Global Mathematics in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

The applicants propose two years of postdoctoral research and training to advance an interdisciplinary program of scholarship on the origins and consequences of globalization in modern mathematics from the early twentieth century to the present. Despite its appearance of unproblematic universality, mathematics has historically been strongly shaped by local constraints and idiosyncrasies, and has crossed borders or oceans only with difficulty. The Fellow aims to explain how mathematicians, through local practices of coordination and individual and institutional efforts at boundary-crossing, have come to sustain a meaningfully global discipline both in spite and because of these idiosyncrasies. Beyond his individual research, the Fellow will continue to organize exchanges and potential publications from a multi-continental and interdisciplinary community of researchers with related interests, building on a successful 2-day symposium on "Global Mathematics" the Fellow co-organized and chaired at the 2017 International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. The Mentor will train the Fellow in professional dimensions of interdisciplinary science and technology studies, including potential workshops and collective publications, and advise the Fellow in connecting this scholarship to recent developments in the history of technology and international history.