| Maximum number of words: | 80,000 |
| Words typed so far: | 86,402 |
| Words typed this week: | 1985 |
| Words lost this week: | 0 |
| Total increase: | 1985 |
| Days I managed to write this week: | 4 |
This week I have been trying to sort the story of the changes in Mathematics in the twentieth century. The thing is that I basically agree with the Wikipedia article:
"The development and continual improvement of computers, at first mechanical analog machines and then digital electronic machines, allowed industry to deal with larger and larger amounts of data to facilitate mass production and distribution and communication, and new areas of mathematics were developed to deal with this: Alan Turing's computability theory; complexity theory; Claude Shannon's information theory; signal processing; data analysis; optimization and other areas of operations research. In the preceding centuries much mathematical focus was on calculus and continuous functions, but the rise of computing and communication networks led to an increasing importance of discrete concepts and the expansion of combinatorics including graph theory. The speed and data processing abilities of computers also enabled the handling of mathematical problems that were too time-consuming to deal with by pencil and paper calculations, leading to areas such as numerical analysis and symbolic computation. Some of the most important methods and algorithms of the 20th century are: the simplex algorithm, the Fast Fourier Transform, error-correcting codes, the Kalman filter from control theory and the RSA algorithm of public-key cryptography."
The problem was when I actually got to looking at the more recognised resources they seemed to think that the history of Mathematics finished at the end of the Second World War. Indeed when I went to one of the few books that covered later than that, what you tended to get immediately before is a history of largely dead white men, what you got post First World War was far more a communal history which includes ideas such as the role of computers but also group publishing of text books (Nicholas Bourbaki anyone). I wish I could clearly argue that this showed a real change the way the work was done but I am also aware of a change of author within the text and suspect this change coincides too neatly with the change of author.
I avoided the history of mathematics when I was an undergraduate, having been forced to do some work on it if only in passing as part of my thesis I am glad of it. It appears that this is one of the last areas where the history is told around the stories of individual people and history is not looked at as group endeavour where there were many players both more or less important. This actually makes the histories quite repetitive as you get bits repeated as it integrates with each player. Plus individuals tended to cross over many different areas so that you can end up switching topics rather too easily as you follow life stories of individuals. I suspect that a research group based approach might be more productive rather than dealing with just figure heads.
Oh well the next challenge is to explore the nature of currents and flows and see what the mathematics tells us about them. This will then get a basis for going back into my thesis proper and developing what is going on within the congregations.
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