Situating International and Global Mathematics

很少有知识形式像数学那样具有内在的普遍性，与它们的生产者和背景如此脱节。然而，这门学科的历史反复告诉我们，数学探究可以特别扎根于地方，远距离的相互理解特别来之不易，也特别不稳定。数学家们在上个世纪为实现他们的普遍抱负而建立的机构和基础设施，使他们的世界更加紧密地联系在一起，更加一体化，但同时也掩盖了这种转变的规模和影响。他们的条件和假设，斗争和妥协，以及不平等和偏见的复杂遗产影响了该学科的过去，现在和未来的各个层面：谁参与，他们如何和在哪里这样做，他们产生了什么知识，他们可以用这些知识做什么。SIGMA将提供第一个综合的历史，从每个有人居住的大陆的角度来理解现代数学的全球化，该项目基于首席研究员在跨大陆和跨学科研究与合作方面的独特经验，为新一代看似无位置理论的跨尺度定位成就研究奠定基础。SIGMA的三条链--机构、结构和含义--将在科学、地缘政治、社会、经济和文化背景下，探究数学中人、地、思想和理想的变化尺度，开发新的方法和框架，以应对数学在环境、语言、实践和网络方面的多样性，并阐明理解和干预一个相互关联的世界所面临的持续挑战。

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.