Massimo Mazzotti (Director of CSTMS and Professor of History of Science at UC Berkeley) and Andrew Arana (Professor of Philosophy at Université de Lorraine) have received the France-Berkeley grant for their collaborative project on mathematics in totalitarian contexts. Their project brings together two internationally leading groups of historians and philosophers of mathematics, based, respectively, at UC Berkeley and at French institutions such as the Archives Poincaré and the Université de Lorraine.
Bringing together the strengths across their teams, this project proposes to examine a new case of the intertwining of mathematical and political normativity: the creation and use of mathematical knowledge within totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The project will focus on two main case studies: Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union. In the first case, they trace how the long-standing mathematical tension between geometric intuition and algebraic computation continued to unfold in Fascist Italy. The Italian school of algebraic geometry sought to resolve this tension in favor of intuition, and they follow these mathematical developments as Italy shifted from a liberal state to a Fascist one in the 1920s and 1930s. They emphasize their political significance and reconstruct the multiple meanings embedded in technical controversies. They also examine the epistemological work performed by key notions such as “intuition” and explore their political resonances.
The Soviet case further exemplifies the heightened political stakes of mathematics amid intense ideological contention. Although the Bolsheviks initially rejected probability theory as a “bourgeois” construct, Soviet mathematicians soon became some of the most influential contributors to twentieth-century probability. The Soviet experience thus reveals the contradictions, challenges, and unexpected opportunities through which mathematical communities navigated and secured their place within a totalitarian system as new forms of scientific order took shape. Taken together, these two cases challenge the widely held belief that mathematics is fundamentally apolitical by showing how mathematical techniques were both shaped by and instrumental in sustaining new social and political realities.
For more information about the grant, please visit the France-Berkeley grant website.