History of Science, Technology, the Environment, and Medicine

Friday, 24 February 2017 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Michael J. Barany, Dartmouth College

“Wordplay, Abuses of Language, and Making Sense in Modern Intercontinental Mathematics”

First proposed in 1945, French mathematician Laurent Schwartz’s theory of distributions became one of the first and most successful mathematical theories to take hold on multiple continents within its first decade, sustaining networks of scholars that interacted on a scale with few precedents in the history of mathematics. Tracing the media and metaphors with which mathematicians explained the theory to each other, advanced new interpretations, and reconciled existing ones, I explain the theory’s early history in terms of mathematicians’ changing ways of “making sense” in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that wordplay and suggestive comparisons—often termed “abuses of language”—helped tie communities of scholars together within the period’s constraints in travel and publication, in ways distinctive to distributions’ context in the histories of mathematics and of international science. Material limits and linguistic ambiguity, here, offered important resources for asserting relevance and unity in a fragmented and heterogeneous discipline. Placing such ambiguities and ambivalences at the center of the history of modern mathematical research offers a new approach to accounting for its scale and development in the last century, related to recent developments in both the history and philosophy of modern science.

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Michael J. Barany received his PhD in 2016 from Princeton’s Program in History of Science and is currently a postdoc in the Dartmouth College Society of Fellows. His current book project explains the globalization of mathematical research and disciplinary institutions in the twentieth century. Some two dozen publications on topics ranging from dots in sixteenth century printed geometry to blackboards in contemporary mathematics are available at http://mbarany.com.

Friday, 17 February 2017 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Tracie Matysik, UT

“Spinozism and Science:  A Matter of Historical Debate”

For over one and a half centuries, Marxist and leftist thinkers have exhibited a complicated affinity for the thought of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Drawn variously to his critique of religion, his strict adherence to absolute immanence, his challenge to conceptions of atomized individualism, his theorization of the fundamental democratic basis of the state — to name just a few points of interest — Spinoza’s politically radical disciples have returned to him again and again to conceptualize the theoretical and epistemological challenges they were confronting in their own time periods. One point of productive tension between Marxism and Spinozism has been the status of science and of natural-scientific materialism. In this presentation, Tracie Matysik will discuss one chapter in this long history, namely the place of Spinozism in the formation of Marxist “orthodoxy” in the years between roughly 1890 and 1905 in German Social Democracy and in the Second International more broadly. She will discuss how and why leading figures in those debates appropriated Spinozism for diverse purposes and tied Spinoza’s thought to a range of scientific discourses of the day.

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Tracie Matysik is an associate professor in the UT History Department. She is the author of Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe (2008) and co-editor of German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures (2016). In addition she has published articles in the histories of secularism, subjectivity, psychoanalysis, globalization, and Spinozism. At present she is working on a book manuscript entitled When Spinoza Met Marx: Experiments in Democratic Activity, 1830-Present, which is an exploration of alternative ways thinkers have approached the idea of meaningful action in the material, sensual world.