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(2016) Historiography of mathematics in the 19th and 20th centuries, Basel, Birkhäuser.
Appropriating role models for the mathematical profession
biographies in the American mathematical monthly around 1900
Per Kragh-Sørensen
pp. 79-108
During the first decade of its existence, the American Mathematical Monthly regularly published short biographies of mathematicians. When read as appropriations of past lives, these biographies can be analysed to provide new insights into the images of mathematics, and of American mathematics in particular, held by groups of authors and welcomed by the readership of the Monthly. Thus, the approach in this paper is a "meta-biographical" one in which biographies are analysed not for their content about past mathematicians but for their appropriation and framing in the context where they were produced. This approach brings forward new insights into the professionalization of mathematics in the United States, the promotion of different disciplines, and the efforts of individuals to cast themselves as following in the footsteps of some of the greatest heroes of mathematics.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-39649-1_5
Full citation:
Kragh-Sørensen, P. (2016)., Appropriating role models for the mathematical profession: biographies in the American mathematical monthly around 1900, in V. R. Remmert, M. R. Schneider & P. Kragh-Sørensen (eds.), Historiography of mathematics in the 19th and 20th centuries, Basel, Birkhäuser, pp. 79-108.
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