Axiomatics by Alma Steingart;

Author:Alma Steingart; [Steingart, Alma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MAT000000 MATHEMATICS / General, MAT015000 MATHEMATICS / History & Philosophy, PHI004000 PHILOSOPHY / Epistemology
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Secular vs. Monastic

“If the National Research Council is to support an attack on pure mathematics,” Saunders Mac Lane wrote to Leon Cohen in July 1954, “this attack should be specifically labeled as such and not mixed in with a careful analysis of the nature of the applications of mathematics.”37 Mac Lane had just completed reading an early draft of the final report of the Committee on Research and Training in Applied Mathematics and he was angry. A few weeks before he received Mac Lane’s letter, Cohen, who only a year earlier had become the program director for mathematical sciences at the NSF, had expressed his own dissatisfaction with an early draft of the report. In a letter to Joachim Weyl, the author of the report, he wrote, “I hope that it will undergo a fundamental revision before publication.”38 In May, a copy of the report was presented at the annual meeting of the Division of Mathematics at the National Research Council, leaving several attendees incensed. Most of the outrage was triggered by a specific section of the report titled “Applied Mathematics in the Scientific Community.” Noting that the section had “been interpreted as a violent attack on the American Mathematical Society,”39 Albert, the current chair of the division, circulated a copy of it among members of the division and leaders in the society.

In response, Marston Morse announced that he would vote for the report only if the “paragraphs with the political implications [were] eliminated.”40 Stone, who was an official member of the committee, was even more outraged. In June, he wrote to Detlev Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and William Rubey, chair of the NRC, in protest. Weyl and other members of the committee, Stone proclaimed, desired to publish as part of the final report “statements about the mathematicians and mathematical organizations of the country, which seem[ed] to be misleading, offensive, and destructive.”41 He also announced that because attempts to convince the committee to change its report had proven futile, he would file a minority report.

The Committee on Research and Training in Applied Mathematics had been established two years earlier. In April 1952, as chair of the Division of Mathematics, Morse sent a letter to Alan Waterman at the NSF, Mina Rees at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and representatives of the Office of Ordnance Research and Air Research and Development Command announcing the appointment of the new committee. Its goal, Morse explained, was to study what universities, the government, and industry could do to support research and training in the field. Asking for financial support for the committee’s work, Morse noted that the above organizations had a “natural interest” in the results of such a study.42 Despite the obvious growth of applied mathematics in the aftermath of the war, by the early 1950s the field was not prospering as some had hoped. The confusion that had surrounded the constitution of the field in the immediate aftermath of the war persisted. Moreover, the field failed to

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