STS Circle at Harvard [image.png] Stephanie Dick Harvard, History of Science
on Coded Collaboration: Doing Mathematics with Computers in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Monday, April 8 12:15-2:00 p.m. Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F [image.png] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts<mailto:[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:[email protected]> by 5pm Wednesday, April 3. Abstract: The advent of modern digital computing in the mid-twentieth century precipitated many transformations in the practices of mathematical knowledge production. However, early computing practitioners throughout the United States subscribed to complicated and conflicting visions of just how much the computer could contribute to mathematics - each suggesting a different division of mathematical labor between humans and computers and a hierarchization of the tasks involved. Some imagined computers as mere plodding “slaves” who would take over tedious and mechanical elements of mathematical research. Others imagined them more generously as “mentors” or “collaborators” that could offer novel insight and direction to human mathematicians. Still others believed that computers would eventually become autonomous agents of mathematical research. And computing communities did not simply narrativize the potential of the computer differently; they also built those different visions right in to computer programs that enabled new ways of doing mathematics with computers. With a focus on communities based in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, this talk will explore different visions of the computer as a mathematical agent, the software that was crafted to animate those imaginings, and the communities and practices of mathematical knowledge-making that emerged in tandem. Biography: Stephanie Dick is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. For the 2012 - 2013 academic year, she is an Exchange Scholar with the Committee for Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. She researches the history of mathematics and computing in the postwar United States. Her dissertation, titled “Aftermath: Following Mathematics into the Digital,” is a history of automated theorem-proving: a field whose practitioners sought to program computers to prove mathematical theorems or to assist human users in doing so. She explores how mathematical objects, practices, and knowledge were transformed by different attempts to program computers this way, emphasizing the material dimension of both mathematics and computing. From July 2012 - June 2015, Stephanie will be a Turing Fellow within the “Turing Centenary Research Project: Mind, Mechanism, and Mathematics,” funded by the John Templeton Foundation. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/ Follow us on Facebook: STS@Harvard<http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS> _______________________________________________
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