Today the field of applied mathematics
has something resembling a disciplinary structure, in
particular as regards a body of more or less canonical
knowledge that is learned by future practicitioners and
that is applied to unsolved problems recognized (by some
at least) as being both proper to the domain and at its
frontier in some sense. In the early years of the
twentieth century the field was much less clearly defined:
Oswald Veblen, in a famous remark, stated that the
existence of applied mathematics was a British illusion.
In this paper we consider some examples of textbooks in a
variety of subfields, attempting to determine to what
extent these illustrate the emergence of a common toolkit,
or set of toolkits, to be transmitted to practitioners and
to those in neighbouring fields, notably engineering and
physics. We will concentrate on Veblen's British illusion,
referring to extremely well-known works by Love, Lamb, and
Whittaker, examining their sources, audiences and
influence in Britain and beyond. We shall see that while
the constitutive components of today discipline –
analysis, scientific computing, and modelling – are
certainly present, they are conceived differently from
today, a situation that poses a rich set of historical
questions.
tirsdag, den
14. maj 2013, kl. 17.00
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Professor Tom
Archibald,
