Situating International and Global Mathematics

很少有知识形式像数学那样具有本质上的普遍性，与它们的创造者和背景如此脱节。然而，这门学科历史上反复出现的教训是，数学研究可以特别扎根于地方，远距离的相互理解特别难以获得和不稳定。数学家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，同时也模糊了这种转变的规模和影响。他们的条件和假设、斗争和妥协、不平等和偏见的复杂遗产影响着这门学科的过去、现在和未来的各个层面：谁参与，他们如何参与，在哪里参与，他们产生了什么知识，他们能用这些知识做什么。SIGMA将提供第一个从每个有人居住的大陆的角度来理解现代数学全球化的综合历史，说明全球研究社区的产生，相互联系的国家和国际机构，以及数学知识的性质和条件的相应转变。该项目建立在首席研究员在跨大陆和跨学科的研究和合作方面的独特经验之上，为新一代的研究奠定了基础，这些研究是在看似没有地方的理论的基础上进行的。SIGMA的三个方面——机构、基础设施和影响——将探讨数学在科学、地缘政治、社会、经济和文化背景下的人物、地点、思想和理想的变化尺度，开发新的方法和框架，以应对数学的环境、语言、实践和网络的多样性，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.