Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Mathematics has undergone tremendous changes, especially during the twentieth century, when it pushed ever deeper into the realm of abstraction. This upheaval even involved a redefinition of the definition itself, as Steingart explains in
Axiomatics. A historian of science, Steingart sees this revolution as central to the modernist movements that dominated the mid-twentieth century in the arts and social sciences, particularly in the United States.” * Nature *
“Steingart provides a history of mathematical thinking over the twentieth century: a compelling review of the increased abstraction of mathematical thought as well as its embrace of deep exploration of alternative axiomatic systems.” * Public Books *
“Steingart takes a wide-angle view on mid-twentieth-century mathematics, connecting the axiomatic movement with high abstraction in modern art, structuralism in the social sciences, the New Criticism in literary criticism, and the deep unease felt by many scientists and mathematicians in the wake of World War II as their research became ever more entangled with military applications. Unfailingly lucid and alert to sympathetic resonances between apparently disparate realms, Steingart positions modern mathematics squarely in the center of high modernism.” -- Lorraine Daston, author of Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
“This sophisticated and wide-ranging book examines mid-century American mathematics as a species of high modernism, both in its pure form and in applied mathematics. It looks at how it was supported, why it was advocated, how and why it was compared to contemporary abstract art, how the evolving ideas of abstraction played out in the Cold War, and how this even affected the writing of the history of mathematics. It is a major addition to and critique of the literature that presents modern mathematics as a species of modernism, and it should be read by every historian of modern science and indeed by anyone interested in how abstract ideas have shaped the modern world.” -- Jeremy Gray, author of Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics
“American mathematics was in the midst of a puzzling contradiction at midcentury: applied mathematics appeared triumphant even as many mathematicians promoted abstraction and rejected the idea that utility was important. Steingart’s brilliant book has finally resolved this puzzle. Far from standing in opposition, mathematics’ utility and idealism, its calculations and foundations, were historically intertwined with the concept of axiomatics. By masterfully weaving together the work of artists and mathematicians, mundane academic conference proceedings and philosophical treatises, Steingart has written an essential guide to the transformation of postwar mathematics.” -- Christopher J. Phillips, author of The New Math: A Political History
“The push for axiomatic reasoning, so central to twentieth-century mathematics, extended by 1950 to elite social science. But the power of this abstract logic, never absolute, was in retreat by the 1990s. Although the most familiar of these challenges took form as a new cult of data, Steingart’s most engaging arguments explore a new fascination with mathematical historicism.” -- Theodore M. Porter, author of Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
"Alma Steingart’s
Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism is an attempt to combine the story of abstraction with developments outside of mathematics. . . . she presents this material from a very interesting and well-informed perspective." * American Mathematical Monthly *
Table of ContentsNote to Readers
Introduction
1. Pure Abstraction: Mathematics as Modernism
2. Applied Abstraction: Axiomatics and the Meaning of Mathematization
3. Human Abstraction: “The Mathematics of Man” and Midcentury Social Sciences
4. Creative Abstraction: Abstract Art, Pure Mathematics, and Cold War Ideology
5. Unreasonable Abstraction: The Meaning of Applicability, or the Miseducation of the Applied Mathematician
6. Historical Abstraction: Kuhn, Skinner, and the Problem of the Weekday Platonist
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Archival Collections
Notes
Index
