Situating International and Global Mathematics

Few forms of knowledge seem so intrinsically universal and so disconnected from their producers and contexts as mathematics. Yet the repeated lesson of the discipline's history is that mathematical inquiry can be especially place-rooted, with long-distance mutual understanding especially hard-won and precarious. The institutions and infrastructures mathematicians built in the last century to realize their universal ambitions made their world dramatically more connected and integrated, while at the same time obscuring the magnitude and implications of this transformation. The complex legacy of their conditions and assumptions, struggles and compromises, and inequities and prejudices affects the discipline's past, present, and future at every level: who participates, how and where they do so, what knowledge they produce, and what they can do with that knowledge.

SIGMA will provide the first integrated history to comprehend the globalization of modern mathematics from the perspective of every inhabited continent, accounting for the production of global research communities, interconnected national and international institutions, and the corresponding transformation of the nature and conditions of mathematical knowledge.

The project builds on the Principal Investigator's unique experience of continent- and discipline-crossing research and collaboration to create a foundation for a new generation of research on the scale-crossing situated achievement of seemingly placeless theories. SIGMA's three strands-Institutions, Infrastructures, and Implications-will interrogate the shifting scales of mathematics' people, places, ideas, and ideals in scientific, geopolitical, social, economic, and cultural contexts, developing new methods and frameworks to reckon with mathematics' diversity of settings, languages, practices, and networks and to elucidate the persistent challenges of understanding and intervening in an interconnected world.