Summer school 2018 of the IMJ-PRG

July 2 - July 6, 2018
Paris, campus Jussieu (quartier latin)

Digital Approaches to the History of Mathematical Sciences: Materiality of Texts – Networks – Classifications

Scientific committee

Catherine Goldstein (CNRS, IMJ-PRG), Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (UPMC, LIP6), Alexandre Guilbaud (UPMC, IMJ-PRG), Irène Passeron (CNRS, IMJ-PRG), Richard Walter (CNRS, ITEM)

Organizing committee

Kahina Bencheikh (IMJ-PRG), Evariste Ciret (IMJ-PRG), Nadine Fournaiseau (IMJ-PRG), Catherine Goldstein (CNRS, IMJ-PRG), Alexandre Guilbaud (UPMC, IMJ-PRG), Emilie Jacquemot (IMJ-PRG), Irène Passeron (CNRS, IMJ-PRG)

Contact: school2018@imj-prg.fr



Courses, conferences and workshops:

  • David Aubin
  • Philip Beeley
  • Frédéric Brechenmacher
  • Charlotte Dessaint
  • Milad Doueihi
  • Marie Dupond
  • Jean-Gabriel Ganascia
  • Catherine Goldstein
  • Alexandre Guilbaud
  • Emmylou Haffner
  • Charles van den Heuvel
  • François Lê
  • Miranda Lewis
  • Serge Linkès
  • Irène Passeron
  • Anne-Sandrine Paumier
  • The development of the Internet and digital technologies has in part modified the working methods and practices of historians of mathematics and ,more generally, of historians of science. This results in different (dematerialised) modes of accessing original documents, new modes of edition, new possibilities to deal with and search within corpuses, new ways to solve long-term issues but also new ways for new questions to arise. This Summer School will present these new opportunities, evaluate their impact on research methodologies and practices and raise questions about their benefits and their limits with respect to a real capacity to bring new results to the history of mathematics. It will therefore provide maximum information to the participants on these issues and open a substantive debate on how these questions specifically arise in the history of mathematics. The discussions will include historians of other scientific disciplines, engineers and IT specialists. The Summer School will be focused on three main topics, which are especially important in current research:

    1. « Materiality and digitalization » : what is an original mathematical document in the digital era, how to access, represent, describe, edit it, and reflect its materiality?

    2. « Text networks »: what are they, what do they represent? how and to what extent are are they used? how will the access to new digital techniques change their use? How can we build, visualize and question them?

    3. « Classifications »: what types of classifications are used to structure corpuses? what questions can they raise (about the notions of disciplines, authors, type of mathematical sources, etc.)? what is the relation between indexation and classification? what is the relationship between classifications and the problem of the historical variability of notions, objects and disciplines?

    The speakers include specialists of digital humanities and historians of mathematics using digital tools. Workshops will be organised to enable the participants to test the approaches on their own corpuses.