Toward a History of American Mathematics

In 1985, historians of American science Sally Kohlstedt and Margaret Rossiter brought together a group of their colleagues "to assess the current state of various specialties [in the history of American science] and to indicate what 'needs and opportunities' remained after more than a decade of significant activity" [15, p. 7].In January of 2025, a group of historians of mathematics was asked to consider essentially the same question in the context of a semester-long research program on "Modern History of Mathematics" at the Isaac Newton Institute (INI) in Cambridge, England.Specifically, they were asked to identify "emerging themes in the modern history of mathematics" and to isolate "the main lacuna" in the discipline's different subfields. 1The first initiative resulted in Kohlstedt and Rossiter's book, Historical Writing on American Science: Perspectives and Prospects [15], the first volume in a new series of Osiris that was brought out under the auspices of the History of Science Society (HSS).Indeed, Arnold Thackray, the then editor of the HSS's journal Isis declared that it "was natural to make American science the theme for volume 1, since, as he saw it, at that moment "within the history of science, scholarship on American science [was] the leading sector" [15, p. 5].This paper resulted from the second initiative.