The first meeting of this semester's seminar in the history and philosophy of mathematics will take place on Monday, September 19th from 3 to 4 PM in Avery 202 on the Pitzer Campus (and on zoom). We will spend the time sharing ideas for future meetings and discussing the chapter on "Algebraic Logic" (chapter 9) in Lukas Verburgt's new book […]
The relation of accessible points in a projective incidence plane defined by Coxeter in the 1960s is the focus of my narrative. It reveals historical pathways bookending the 19th and 20th centuries that bring G.K.C. von Staudt, Mario Pieri, Marvin Greenberg and others into the conversation. The published references to Coxeter’s theory, including his own, […]
The Human Betterment Foundation was a pro-eugenics think-tank operating in the 1930s and early 1940s out of Pasadena, California. Its aim was to influence public and medical opinion in favor of sterilization of "socially undesirable elements": disabled, poor, and racialized people. Many board members had ties to Caltech, most notably Caltech's then-president Robert Millikan. Upon […]
Deniz Sarikaya joining us from the Technical University of Denmark and speaking on "Narratives of Mathematical Practice (and why they matter!)" (abstract below). The speaker will join via zoom, but there will be a live audience on the second floor of Pitzer College's Gold Student Center in the Multipurpose room (in the building marked 3 here: https://www.pitzer.edu/about/maps-directions/quick-reference-map/). […]
Title: Diving into Math with Emmy Noether Starring: Anita Zieher; Director: Sandra Schueddekopf Abstract: A theatre performance by Portraittheater Vienna in co-operation with Freie Universität Berlin about the life of […]
"The Sceptical Mathematician: How John Wallis Saved Mathematics for the Royal Society." Abstract: The members of the “Invisible College” and the early Royal Society championed an experimental approach to the study […]
True Grit: Writing the History of Women at Yerkes Observatory, 1895–1950 Abstract: Women at Yerkes Observatory earned advanced degrees, conducted their own research, collaborated on projects with peers of both sexes, and authored publications in their own names in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Yet Alice Hall Farnsworth, Mary Murray Hopkins, Harriet McWilliams […]
Inventing the ‘Islamic Golden Age’: Orientalism and the History of Mathematics Abstract: TBA
Speaker: Iris Clever, University of Chicago Title: The Making of the Modern Statistical Identity: From Skull Science to Biometrics Abstract: In this presentation, I uncover an overlooked genealogy of biometrics, tracing it back to early 20th-century race science and the rise of statistical thinking about human identity. Before biometrics became a technology of controlling human identity, […]
This one-day workshop assembles diverse perspectives from the history and philosophy of mathematics to examine ways in which mathematics is applied and impure. Topics will range from applications of mathematics […]
