Changing Channels: Constructing and comparing national identities in French and British mathematics, c. 1800-1840 / Des effets de Manche: sur la construction et la comparaison d’identités nationales dans les mathématiques françaises et britanniques, 1800-1840

Liste des Contributions

1. The construction of national, cultural, and philosophical divides between French and British mathematics: a historiographical reassessment

Nicolas Michel (Bergische Universität Wuppertal)

24/05/2024 10:00

A locus classicus in the historiography of (early) 19th century mathematics is that of the divide between French and English practices and conceptions of that science -- a divide often framed in terms of foundational approaches, and pedagogical practices, and cultural matrices. A closer look at this historiography, however, reveals that it draws on a rather narrow conception of its subject: be...

2. Reconsidering the “decline of 18C British mathematics”

Niccolò Guicciardini (Università degli Studi di Milano)

24/05/2024 11:00

The historiographical notion of a "supposed decline of 'British mathematics' after the death of Isaac Newton" has been "thoroughly nuanced, if not outright debunked", as Brigitte Stenhouse and Nicolas Michel write in the seminar prospectus. At present, we can read several historical accounts of the development of 18th-century calculus and algebra, and even accounts in which not only "pure"...

3. Lending authority from ‘French analysis’ in the work of Mary Somerville

Brigitte Stenhouse (The Open University)

24/05/2024 13:45

As a woman in late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Britain, Mary Somerville was almost unique in cultivating for herself a reputation as an expert mathematician. Much of this reputation relied upon recognition of her studies of mathematics recently developed in Paris, especially the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace in physical astronomy. Indeed in 1827, the President of the Society for the...

4. Professional mathematical circulations between France, England and the United States. Discussions on the national identities of carriage-makers through the place of descriptive geometry in coach design (1850-1900)

Thomas Preveraud (Université d'Artois)

24/05/2024 14:45

This paper examines the circulation of descriptive geometry - a mathematical theory formalizing projection techniques for the flat drawing of three-dimensional objects - in carriage woodworkers and makers’ drawing practices at the end of the 19th century. The use of descriptive geometry in this professional milieu was first documented in France; the mathematical theory then circulated in...

5. Table ronde

Ivahn Smadja (Nantes Université), Karine Chemla (CNRS - SPHERE)

24/05/2024 16:15