Workshop on the History of Algebra in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Abstract SES # 0216982 Workshop on the History of Algebra in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Michael Singer, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Cal -Berkeley Karen Parshall, University of Virginia This proposal is for a workshop at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California at Berkeley in spring 2003. The conference, which culminates a semester-long focus at the Institute on commutative algebra, brings together leading historians of mathematics and mathematicians for a five-day discussion of relevant topics. This workshop represents an important departure for the institute, which normally focuses on purely mathematical enterprises. The organizers are Jeremy J. Gray (Centre for the History of the Mathematical Sciences, The Open University) and co-PI, Karen Hunger Parshall (Departments of History and Mathematics, University of Virginia). The workshop should have two components: lectures and moderated discussions. Some twenty, hour-long lectures are to be delivered over a five-day period by established researchers, more junior scholars, and advanced graduate students. Ample time for questions and discussion follows each lecture. Each day closes with a moderated discussion period for a dialogue between the historians and the mathematicians visiting MSRI about critical issues in the history of modern algebra. Among the topics to be analyzed are: o the contribution of David Hilbert to modern algebra, his re-working of the ideas of Dedekind and Kronecker, and the role of his new formulation of the subject in guiding subsequent research; o the origins of Emmy Noether's work and its later developments; o the spread and development of algebraic thought from Germany to Britain, France, and the United States; o the importance and the nature of the connections between commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, and algebraic number theory; o the philosophy and the teaching of modern algebra; and o the institutionalization of modern algebra in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This workshop provides a unique forum for the interaction of historians of mathematics and mathematicians, who represent one of the primary audiences for research in the history of mathematics. Moreover, the workshop will allow us to take a major step forward not only in understanding the evolution of modern algebra in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also in defining a common agenda for on-going research in the history of modern mathematics. Both of these objectives will be accomplished in the short term through interactions at the workshop and in the long term through a published, book-length volume with an explicitly historiographical component.