Date/Time
Friday
5 May 2017
9:30 am - 12:00 pm

Location
Social Science Matrix

Event Type
Conference

Please join us for a public symposium on the “Longue Durée History of Algorithmic Thinking in Mathematics.”

Social Science Matrix, Barrows Hall (8th floor), U.C. Berkeley

This symposium brings together leading thinkers in the history of mathematics to reflect on the longue durée presence and influence of “algorithmic thinking.” We emphasize continuities over ruptures and expose recurrent themes, such as the mechanization of logical and mathematical procedures, which predate the dawn of electronic computing but are often presented today as if they were radically new. This event serves as an opportunity to bridge the clear gap between the sophisticated historiography of mathematics and the current debate on digital algorithms.

9:30am: Coffee, Opening Remarks by Massimo Mazzotti on “Algorithmic Life”

10:00am: Public Presentations

Amir Alexander. The Orderly Universe: How the Calculus became an Algorithm.

Michael Barany. “Some call it Arsmetrike, and some Awgryme”: Misprision and precision in algorithmic thinking and learning in 154 and beyond.

Abram Kaplan. A Preliminary Look at the Use of Algorithms in Demonstrations in the Late Sixteenth-Century Ars Magna.

Kevin Lambert. Material Mathematics: British Algebra as Algorithmic Mathematics.

Caitlin C. Rosenthal. Numbers for the Innumerate: Algorithmic Thinking and Atlantic Capitalism.

Theodora Dryer. Mathematical Statistics and The New Deal: A Political History of Algorithmic Thinking in U.S. Agriculture, 1933-1939.

Christopher Phillips. Inference Rituals: Algorithms and the history of statistical testing.

Andrew Fiss. “For Computing is our duty”: How Women Became Computers.

Stephanie Dick. That is not Why: Case Studies in Algorithmic Thinking.