Description:

The Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program is excited to host Michael J. Barany, a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth College Society of Fellows and Department of History, for a lecture on the history of Mathematics in Latin America.

Few in the world of professional mathematics took notice of Latin American mathematicians and institutions before World War 2. After the war, however, sites including Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro quickly became vital nodes in new international networks for the pure mathematics profession. Based on archival work in South America, North America, and Europe, Michael will characterize the convergence of local and international actors--including university officials, UNESCO technocrats, and program officers of the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, as well as mathematicians in a range of contexts--whose intersecting projects and infrastructures made this transformation possible. Modern mathematics in this newly interconnected pan-American context represented both a cultural and technical achievement and intervention, pursued through different strategies with different effects at the discipline's respective Latin American centers.