The New Era in American Mathematics, 1920–1950

The New Era in American Mathematics,

1920–1950

The New Era in American Mathematics,

1920–1950

KAREN HUNGER PARSHALL

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

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For Brian and Mom

CONTENTS

Prefacexi

Acknowledgmentsxxiii

Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes and Tables for American Mathematical Publicationsxxvii

PART I. 1920–1929: WE ARE EVIDENTLY ON THE VERGE OF IMPORTANT STEPS FORWARD. —ROLAND RICHARDSON, UNDATED BUT EARLY 19261

1 Surveying the 1920s Research Landscape3

Mathematicians in Colleges and Universities5

A Recognized American Specialty: Analysis Situs13

Geometries, Differential and Algebraic23

Algebraic Research34

Research in Analysis46

Areas of Lesser American Interest57

2 Strengthening the Infrastructure of American Mathematics63

Corporatizing Research-Level Mathematics64

Raising Money to Enable Research75

Sustaining Support for Publication82

Championing American Achievements93

3 Breaking onto the International Scene102

Engaging in the International Politics of Mathematics103

Americans Abroad113

Europeans in the United States123

An Englishman in America and an American in England: The Hardy-Veblen Exchange132

International Competition and Collaboration: The Case of Point-Set Topology in Poland and the United States139

PART II. 1929–1941: "A GENERATION AGO WE WERE IN NEED OF DIRECT STIMULATION … NOW WE COULD WELL INTERCHANGE." —GRIFFITH EVANS, 16 JANUARY, 1934145

4 Sustaining the Momentum?147

Trying to Do Mathematical Research in the Early 1930s148

The Targeted Building of Programs in the 1930s164

A New Experiment: The Institute for Advanced Study171

Journals in an Evolving Research Community180

5 Adapting to Geopolitical Changes191

International Business as Usual?192

Embracing Foreign Mathematicians199

Mathematicians and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars203

A First Wave of Mathematical Refugees Hits the Northeast213

The First Wave of Mathematical Refugees Spreads over the Rest of the Country221

6 Taking Stock in a Changing World232

Conflicting Perceptions of the Mathematical Endeavor233

Developments in Topology241

Geometrical Shifts251

Strides in Algebraic Research261

Analysis in the 1930s273

7 Looking beyond the United States287

Hosting the International Congress of Mathematicians?288

Confronting a Second Wave of Mathematical Émigrés297

Accommodating a Second Wave of Mathematical Émigrés in the Northeast307

Accommodating a Second Wave of Mathematical Émigrés outside the Northeast316

Geopolitics and Mathematical Reviewing in the Late 1930s323

PART III. 1941–1950: THE CENTER OF GRAVITY OF MATHEMATICS HAS MOVED MORE DEFINITELY TOWARD AMERICA. —ROLAND RICHARDSON, 25 APRIL, 1939337

8 Waging War339

Mobilizing American Mathematics for War340

A New Educational Initiative: Brown’s Program of Advanced Instruction and Research in Mechanics350

War Work360

Trying to Maintain Professional Normalcy in Wartime385

9 Picking Back Up and Moving On in the Postwar World397

Adjusting to New Political Realities398

Reestablishing a Professional Rhythm405

Building Programs412

Disseminating Postwar Mathematical Results424

10 Sustaining and Building Research Agendas431

The Princeton Bicentennial Conference on Problems of Mathematics 432

Sustaining American Research Agendas443

Building New American Research Agendas460

Coda: A New Era in American Mathematics476

The New Domestic Politics of Mathematics477

The New Geopolitics of Mathematics484

The International Congress of Mathematicians: Cambridge, MA, 1950496

References511

Index567

PREFACE

We are evidently on the verge of important steps forward, declared Roland Richardson in 1926.¹ The Canadian-born, Yale-trained analyst, and Brown University professor was forty-seven years old and just beginning his fifth year as Secretary of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). It was the AMS, comprised of those who valued and were committed to the production of original mathematical research, that constituted the inclusive we in his assessment.

In four short years, Richardson had been instrumental in helping AMS Presidents—analyst Gilbert Bliss of the University of Chicago, Princeton geometer-turned-algebraic-topologist-turned-differential-geometer Oswald Veblen, and Harvard analyst George Birkhoff—to effect, oversee, and document a number of key changes. Together, they had worked toward the legal incorporation of the AMS; they had effected a massive membership drive that had brought the Society’s numbers from 770 when Richardson began as Secretary in 1921 to 1,692 in 1926 for an almost 220% increase; they had organized a capital campaign that had set the AMS’s publication enterprise on a sound financial footing; and they had successfully made the case for the inclusion of mathematicians in the Rockefeller Foundation–funded postdoctoral fellowship program of the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council.² It had been, in Bliss’s view, a critical period in the development of our American mathematical school, while Birkhoff felt that he and Veblen, in particular, had worked together to ‘boost’ mathematics into the position it deserves to have.³ Richardson was thus not alone among politically savvy 1920s mathematical leaders in seeing these as auspicious changes that clearly delineated that decade in the evolution of research-level mathematics in the United States.

Research, however, was but one aspect of professional mathematical life. Teaching was another. Since its founding in 1888 as the New York Mathematical Society, the AMS had been primarily devoted to, as its founders expressed it, preserving, supplementing, and utilizing the results of their mathematical studies, that is, to research.⁴ Yet, it had always been the case that its members, as they pursued their research and increasingly valued it as a means of determining professional stature and aiding professional advancement, spent much of their time in classrooms, both undergraduate and graduate. When push came to shove, though, the AMS, while appreciative both of the importance of work geared toward the teaching of undergraduate mathematics and of its value to mathematical science, had no real interest in fostering such work in and of itself and welcomed the creation of a new organization to that end.⁵

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) came into existence at the end of December 1915 thanks largely to the efforts of Herbert Slaught, professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, overseer of all things pedagogical in its Department of Mathematics, and the then editor of the more undergraduate teaching–oriented American Mathematical Monthly. Indeed, the Monthly became the official journal of the new MAA. Like Slaught and many other mathematicians, the MAA’s first President, the Göttingen-trained, University of Missouri analyst Earle Hedrick, was a member of both the AMS and the MAA in recognition of his dual professional mission. Over the course of its first ten years, the MAA firmly established itself as the AMS’s faithful partner in encouraging the mathematical endeavor in the United States, even though their respective areas of concern remained largely separate.⁶

If the Roaring Twenties started off strong for the American mathematical research community, they certainly did not end that way. When the U.S. stock market crashed in October 1929, a worldwide Depression ensued. University budgets were slashed. Trained mathematicians, like so many others, had their salaries cut or, worse, found themselves out of work, while mathematicians-in-training faced a grim job market.

The long climb out of the financial hole throughout the 1930s coincided with unsettling political developments in Europe. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power was followed by the Nazis’ assault on the Jews of Germany and prompted a Jewish exodus. In particular, beginning in the spring of 1933, the American mathematical community was confronted with a first wave of foreigners seeking positions in the United States. There seemed no way for all of them to be absorbed, but Veblen, by then at the Institute for Advanced Study, Richardson, and others, nevertheless worked hard in an effort to accommodate as many of them as possible.

Had it been the 1890s or the pre–World War I decades of the new century when so many aspiring American mathematicians like Hedrick had gone abroad, and especially to Germany, for their advanced mathematical training, these émigrés might well have been welcomed with unequivocally open arms. After all, that would have represented a reversal. The European mathematical mountain would have been coming to the American Muhammad rather than vice versa. Still, some like analyst Griffith Evans, hired by the University of California in 1934 to revivify its program in mathematics, saw things differently in the Depression’s depths. A generation ago we were in need of direct stimulation and there was plenty of room, he allowed. [N]ow, however, we could well interchange.⁷ In other words, from the perspective he shared with others in the community, American mathematicians were no longer students of the Europeans. They had been producing fundamental mathematical research that was filling the pages of their journals at home and, to a lesser extent, abroad. In so doing, they had, in their view at least, become mathematical peers, even if it seemed that the Europeans did not yet see it that way. It was another auspicious change from the situation at the century’s turn.

By the end of the 1930s, the American mathematical community was readying itself to highlight its talents as host, in 1940, of its first International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). As its planning drew to a close and as it anticipated the event itself—one its leaders felt sure would establish once and for all its mathematical equality with Europe—Hitler’s ongoing aggression resulted in September 1939 in the outbreak of World War II. An American ICM would have to be postponed indefinitely. Not only that, a second, even larger, wave of European mathematicians came crashing westward toward a community that thought it had already reached its saturation point. This renewed emigration, together with initiatives, among them, the creation of the Mathematical Reviews on American shores, left Richardson with the strong sense that the center of gravity of mathematics has moved more definitely toward America.⁸

The manifestation of that shift would only become more widely evident after the war’s end. The four years from 1941 to 1945 found the American mathematical community focused on its standing not internationally but at home. It faced challenges on at least two fronts: how to mobilize itself effectively for the war effort and how to engage with a nascent but then soon fast-growing scientific bureaucracy that threatened to ignore the contributions it could make and, in so doing, fail to support it.

Relative to the first, it recognized that, while its technical expertise, the purview of the AMS, could contribute in key ways to the nation’s military success, perhaps its chief contribution would come through teaching, the purview of the MAA. After all, basic mathematics was essential to the effectiveness of gunners in the air and soldiers on the ground. Young men from all walks of life, they would need instruction. It would not be glamorous work, but it would be critical, and the country’s mathematicians already knew how to do it well.

Meeting the second challenge, however, would require mathematical leaders to hone a new set of skills. Richardson, Bliss, Veblen, Birkhoff, and others in the 1920s and 1930s had ultimately been successful in persuading both individual donors and private foundations that research-level mathematics merited their support. Richardson’s successor, in 1941, as AMS Secretary, the University of Pennsylvania topologist John Kline and the AMS Presidents with whom he served in the 1940s—analyst Marston Morse of the Institute for Advanced Study and Harvard’s algebraically oriented analyst Marshall Stone, among others—found themselves thrust into Washington politics as well as into the geopolitics of the postwar era. Their success or failure thus depended on their ability to master the political game.

When the National Defense Research Committee (f. 1940) and then the Office of Scientific Research and Development (f. 1941) were created in Washington to coordinate the anticipated mobilization of science in the nation’s defense, American mathematicians found themselves overlooked by the physicists, chemists, and engineers at their helms. It became imperative to get the message across in Washington that mathematics was just as fundamental to a war effort as the other sciences, especially since large sums of money soon began to flow from Federal coffers in support of war-related research. Moreover, some in Congress had begun advocating for the Federal support of science even in peacetime. Mathematicians needed to be part of that conversation as well. Kline, Morse, and Stone, among others, worked capably to these ends.

The American mathematical research community emerged from the war with a new sense of self. The United States, Kline stated categorically in November 1945, has assumed world leadership in mathematics.⁹ If he was right, that status brought with it new responsibilities. Research would have to remain strong, but, as in the case of the Germany to which Americans had flocked prior to the First World War, research agendas at home would have to spark interest abroad as well as domestically. The community might also be expected to take on, or might actually be called upon to tackle, broader initiatives.

In the closing five years of the 1940s, American mathematicians not only poured themselves into their research, as evidenced by the inundation of their journals, but also renewed their plans for hosting an ICM, this time in 1950. A decade earlier, they had aimed to show that they were Europe’s mathematical peer; in 1950, they were the field’s presumptive world leader. Unfortunately, their planning took place just as the Cold War’s chill began to set in. It would be incumbent upon the world’s leader actually to bring the world’s mathematicians together, despite extra-mathematical geopolitics, yet it was precisely those politics that risked preventing the attendance of colleagues both from formerly enemy nations and of Communist or socialist political persuasions. Such geopolitics also affected American initiatives, and especially those of Marshall Stone, to reestablish the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a body founded in 1920 that had ultimately succumbed in the 1930s to post–World War I animosity. Politics are almost always messy, and those in which American mathematicians engaged in the late 1940s were no exception. Still, in 1950, the American mathematical community was not only host to the largest and most geographically diverse ICM since the inception of ICMs in Zürich in 1897, but the groundwork had also been laid for the IMU’s re-formation in 1951.

Told in this way, the story of the American mathematical research community over the three decades from 1920 to 1950 is a rousing success. Indeed, as the quotations from their correspondence and speeches attest, that is how the community’s leaders saw it. It could, however, have been otherwise. At many points, outcomes could have been different. Successes could have been failures. In the 1920s, private foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation might not have been persuaded by the mathematicians’ arguments that their field merited external support just as much as, say, medicine did. Some universities, like the University of California in Berkeley, might not have been convinced in the depths of the Depression in the 1930s that the time was actually ripe to build up their departments of mathematics. American mathematicians might not have exhibited the agility over the course of all three decades to take their research in new directions, to embrace and create new approaches, and to attract others internationally to their way of thinking.

This book follows members of the American mathematical community over the course of the thirty-year period from 1920 to 1950 as they developed strategies to deal with the challenges they faced. At the same time, it finds them at work: producing original research, training and nurturing future researchers, engaging in collegiate teaching, building professional infrastructure, participating in the international life of their field, serving their country in wartime, and positioning themselves in the postwar world. Between 1920 and 1950, they witnessed the dramatic growth of their community from 770 to some 4,411 strong for a more than 570% increase.¹⁰ Given a group this large, it will be impossible to mention all of the men and women of various ethnicities who comprised it or to highlight every program that contributed to it. The book thus necessarily aims to be representative not comprehensive.

Part one treats the 1920s, a decade, as noted, when Richardson viewed his community as on the verge of important steps forward. One of those steps involved, as detailed in chapter one, the production of original research. Americans worked in many areas of contemporaneous mathematics—algebraic and point-set topology, algebraic and differential geometry, algebra, and analysis—but some areas—among them, number theory, mathematical logic, and applied mathematics—engaged them less. This chapter focuses on who was doing what sort of mathematics where in an effort to give not only a flavor of American mathematical research in the 1920s but also a sense of the research community’s geographical distribution. Chapters six and ten in part two on the 1930s and part three on the 1940s, respectively, pick up and weave these technical threads further, tracking mathematical developments, shifts in research foci, changing personnel, and the geographical dispersion of programs supportive of mathematics at the research level.

Part one’s second chapter focuses on the building and strengthening of mathematical infrastructure in the 1920s. In addition to advances on philanthropic fronts that provided support for mathematical publications, postdoctoral fellowships were created that gave newly minted Ph.D.s the opportunity to establish individual research agendas—and thereby significantly to increase the United States’ mathematical output—before being thrust into teaching-intensive faculty positions. Community leaders also recognized the importance of championing the mathematical research achievements that their infrastructure aimed to foster. To be competitive with the other sciences, like physics and chemistry with their Nobel Prizes, those leaders recognized that prizes needed to be created, honors bestowed, and other forms of recognition devised for mathematics as well.

Yet, academic competition does not just take place at home. American mathematicians of the 1920s, many of whom had received all or part of their advanced training in Europe in the decades before World War I, had a strong sense of the wider mathematical world and of their evolving place in it. But how could they change European perceptions of them as students? One way would be for key Europeans to come to the United States in order to experience their mathematical community firsthand. Was it time for American mathematicians actually to host an ICM? Another way would be for Americans to go abroad as mathematical peers, giving lectures on their latest work, attending meetings, interacting one-on-one. Two-way international travel was a much more viable option by the 1920s thanks to the inclusion of mathematics in the postdoctoral travel grants programs of the International Education Board and the National Research Council, both underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. Chapter three develops these and other, more outward-looking, international themes.

The Threadbare Thirties and the lead-up to the United States’ entry into World War II followed the Roaring Twenties and serve to frame the book’s second part.¹¹ A decade characterized in the minds of some like Evans as one in which the American mathematical community had finally pulled even with Europe, it was complicated by two major extra-mathematical events: the Depression and Hitler’s Nazi regime. Chapter four looks at the American mathematical research community in the aftermath of the stock market crash and analyzes the extent to which it was able to sustain the momentum it had built up over the course of the twenties. Publication was affected as the AMS and the MAA both had to cut costs, but the AMS, in particular, launched another fund drive, this time targeting academic institutions for support for its journal enterprise. If universities in particular were going to place increasing emphasis on the publication of original research in matters of academic advancement, then, the AMS’s ultimately successful argument went, they should help offset the cost of that publication. That such an argument actually worked is almost astonishing, given its timing during the Depression. Also counterintuitive perhaps, not only did a number of programs in the Northeast, the Midwest, the West, and the South maintain or even strengthen their programs in mathematics at this time of financial hardship, but new journals were founded and sustained and a new type of institution, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was created ex nihilo from philanthropic dollars.

This historical juncture also presented the American mathematical research community with a very different challenge: how to cope with the influx of would-be mathematical émigrés who came in two distinct waves over the course of the decade. Chapters five and seven examine both the close relationship that key American mathematicians developed with the various societies created to aid European refugees and the strategies they employed in accepting and placing them. The two chapters also consider the reception those émigrés received in the communities into which they found themselves transplanted. Chapter seven, in particular, looks at the placement process in the broader context of an American mathematical research community positioning itself to assume a leadership role internationally. That leadership manifested itself both in the organization of an ultimately aborted International Congress of Mathematicians and in creating a home base for a new international reviewing journal, the Mathematical Reviews, under the editorship of émigré mathematician and historian of mathematics, Otto Neugebauer.

The book’s third and final part provides evidence for Richardson’s perception that the center of gravity of mathematics …moved more definitely toward America as the 1940s opened as well as for Kline’s view that [t]he United States ha[d] assumed world leadership in mathematics by the middle of the decade. Chapter eight follows American mathematicians as they first mobilized for and then actively engaged in the war effort. At Brown, Richardson, on stepping down after almost two decades as AMS Secretary, immediately poured himself into the creation of a new program of advanced instruction and research in mechanics that aimed, once and for all, to begin to fill the United States’ institutional lacuna in applied mathematics. Mathematicians at Brown and, indeed, at institutions large and small from coast to coast, also engaged in teaching relatively elementary mathematics to the country’s Armed Forces. Others contributed to the solution of specific problems posed by the military in contexts such as the Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland; the Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee with its pockets of expertise at Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Berkeley, and elsewhere; in England as part of the Eighth Army’s Operations Research Service; and at Los Alamos in New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project. As they engaged in this war work, they also managed to sustain their research momentum and other professional activities.

After the war, as they reestablished their prewar rhythms in research and publication as well as undergraduate and graduate training—matters introduced in chapter nine and detailed in chapter ten—they also began actively to engage in what became the politics of postwar American science. The problem was that it was unclear initially just what such politics would look like and how they would be played. Chapter nine opens by examining the failed efforts in 1945 and 1946 to establish a Research Board for National Security within the Federal government and proceeds to consider the successful creation of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). As Congress continued to debate the possibility of a Federally funded National Science Foundation, the realization of which would only come in 1950 as discussed in the book’s coda, the ONR set an example for the Federal funding of mathematical research under the sage guidance of Chicago-trained algebraist, Mina Rees. These political debates were set against backdrops of postwar program building—at, for example, the University of Chicago and, in the South, at Tulane and Louisiana State University—and of what developed into a postwar publication crisis as the nation’s journals were flooded with new mathematical results. The book closes with a coda that sketches the initial contours of a postwar era in which the American mathematical community, through its engagement in the politics both of finally hosting the first postwar ICM and of setting up a new International Mathematical Union, began playing an active leadership role in mathematics internationally.

When David Rowe and I published our book, The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community, 1876–1900, in 1994, we saw the evolution of research-level mathematics in terms of a periodization in which the general structure-building of American science as a whole, of which mathematics was a part, preceded the period from 1876 to 1900 in which an actual mathematical research community emerged.¹² Although our book and our research focused on that emergent period, we posited two more periods: one, from 1900 to 1933 in which American mathematics at the research level consolidated and grew and another from 1933 to roughly 1960 defined by the influx of European mathematical émigrés, the development of various areas of applied mathematics, and the institutionalization of Federal funding for science in general and mathematics in particular. Here—and building on research done by many in the intervening twenty-six years but by, in particular, Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze on the impact on American mathematics of both the Rockefeller Foundation and the European émigrés—I argue for a refinement of our earlier periodization.¹³

An American mathematical research community had emerged from the American scientific community as a whole by 1900, as, arguably, had an American research community in physics and other areas. Thereafter, it did consolidate and grow, even if this did not initially detract from the continuing allure of mathematical Europe. Programs, especially at Chicago and Harvard, consolidated by making strong hires, thereby continuing to attract American mathematical aspirants. Others, at, for example, Princeton and several of the land grant universities, grew. These developments were reflected in the more than doubling of the AMS’s membership between 1900 and 1920.¹⁴

The processes that resulted in the research community’s emergence around 1900, however, were largely the same as those that shaped the consolidation and growth of the first two decades of the twentieth century: research, publication, and the training of future researchers; institution-building within the context of the American university; and self-governance within the context of the AMS.¹⁵ While these processes still characterized the decades from 1920 to 1950, those thirty years witnessed fundamental changes, among them, the actual capitalization of American mathematics by sources—private donors, private foundations, and the Federal government—outside the college and university context, the accommodation and assimilation of European mathematical émigrés into what was already a fully formed and highly functioning research community, and the conviction that the American mathematical research endeavor equaled that of Europe. To the extent that periodizations are helpful, the years from 1900 to 1920 might, indeed, be termed a period of consolidation and growth, but, as I argue in the pages that follow, those from 1920 to 1950 were distinct from it in representing a new era in which the American mathematical research community emerged as a major player on the international mathematical stage.

1. Roland Richardson to Gilbert Bliss, Luther Eisenhart, Edward Huntington, Dunham Jackson, and Robert Moore, undated but early 1926, Box 4RM75, Folder: Richardson, Roland George Dwight (1922–1947), Moore Papers.

2. For the membership numbers, see Roland Richardson, The Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, BAMS 27 (1921), 245–265 on p. 246 and The Thirty-third Annual Meeting of the Society, BAMS 33 (1927), 129–152 on p. 131.

3. Gilbert Bliss, A Letter from the President, BAMS 28 (1922), 16 and Birkhoff to Veblen, 17 February, 1927, Box 2, Folder: Birkhoff, George D., Veblen Papers, respectively.

4. Thomas Fiske, Edward Stabler, and Harold Jacoby in a circular dated November 1888, as quoted in Raymond Archibald, A Semicentennial History of the American Mathematical Society, 1888–1938 (New York: American Mathematical Society, 1938; reprint ed., New York: Arno Press, 1980), p. 4.

5. Frank Cole, The April Meeting of the Society in New York, BAMS 21 (1915), 481–493 on p. 482.

6. I treat the founding of the MAA and its first decade in The Stratification of the American Mathematical Community: The Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society, 1915–1925, in A Century of Advancing Mathematics, ed. Stephen Kennedy et al. (Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 2015), pp. 159–175.

7. Griffith Evans to Oswald Veblen, 16 January, 1934, Box 4, Folder: Courant, Richard 1923–38, Veblen Papers.

8. Roland Richardson to Dear Colleagues, 25 April, 1939, Box 11, Folder: Richardson, R.G.D. 1939, Veblen Papers.

9. John Kline, Rehabilitation of Graduate Work, AMM 53 (1946), 121–131 on p. 131.

10. William Whyburn, The Annual Meeting of the Society, BAMS 57 (1951), 109–152 on p. 113.

11. Ivan Niven, The Threadbare Thirties, in A Century of Mathematics in America, ed. Peter L. Duren et al., 3 vols. (Providence: American Mathematical Society and London: London Mathematical Society, 1988–1989), 1: 209–229.

12. Karen Hunger Parshall and David Rowe, The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community, 1876–1900: J. J. Sylvester, Felix Klein, and E. H. Moore, HMATH, vol. 8 (Providence: American Mathematical Society and London: London Mathematical Society, 1994), pp. 427–428.

13. Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, Rockefeller and the Internationalization of Mathematics between the Two World Wars: Documents and Studies for the Social History of Mathematics in the 20th Century (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2001) and Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany: Individual Fates and Global Impact (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

14. The membership numbered 357 in 1900. See Members of the Society, BAMS 7 (1901), 9–33 on p. 33.

15. In American Mathematics 1890–1913: Catching Up to Europe (Washington, D.C.: MAA Press, 2017), Steve Batterson contends that a major change took place in 1913, namely, that by that date the American mathematical community was on the verge of parity with mathematical Europe (p. 197). The argument I present here suggests that that date is premature by roughly a quarter-century.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book began to take shape in 2006 as I was casting about for a new project following the publication of my biography of James Joseph Sylvester. That June, the now-lamented Peter Neumann (1940–2020) invited me to speak in the Oxford History of Mathematics Forum that he hosted in his rooms in Queen’s College. The topic was work in progress, so I took the opportunity to try out some early thoughts on what a book on the American mathematical research community in the first half of the twentieth century might look like. The discussion that ensued convinced me that while the idea was sound, the project would likely be much bigger and more complex than I had initially thought.

In 1994, David Rowe and I had published our book, The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community, 1876–1900: James Joseph Sylvester, Felix Klein, and E. H. Moore. As our subtitle indicated, that process depended on a small number of key figures. The new project, were it to materialize, would be different. Many more people would be involved; the mathematics produced would be more diverse; the forces shaping the community would be more complex. How to rein it in?

As I continued to mull things over and to pursue various avenues of research, life intervened. Victor Katz and I conceived of, wrote, and then published (in 2014) our book, Taming the Unknown: A History of Algebra from Antiquity to the Early Twentieth Century, and I served a three-year stint as Associate Dean of the Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. On returning to my departments after a year’s research leave, my then History Department chair, Paul Halliday, invited me to give our annual Robert Cross Memorial Lecture, an event that uniquely brings the whole department together to focus on and discuss the current work of one of its own. I have never worked harder on a talk! I chose to speak on the American mathematics project. It was time to move it off the back burner. Putting together that talk effectively allowed me to outline the argument of the present book, an argument honed thanks to the perspicuous critiques—over multiple drafts—of my History Department colleague, Joe Kett.

One of the university’s Sesquicentennial Fellowships in the spring of 2016 allowed me actually to begin writing the book. I spent an incredible month of that semester as a professeur invité at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris as the guest of my friend and colleague, Catherine Goldstein. From my commodious apartment within the university’s walls and inspired by my view of the Institut du monde arabe and the Seine, I completed a first chapter, the book’s second, as I participated in the vibrant history of mathematics community that Catherine animates at Paris VI. The project was officially under way.

That was a good thing, since I began a three-year tour of duty as chair of the History Department in the fall of 2016. Progress during those three years was slow but steady. The light at the end of that particular tunnel was a year’s research leave, one semester the result of the chaired professorship with which the university had honored me in 2016 and the other for service rendered as department chair. At the end of my leave, the book was complete, owing in no small part to Virginia’s appreciation and support of its faculty’s research.

In addition to Peter, Paul, Joe, and Catherine, many people encouraged and helped me bring this project to a close. First, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of the archivists and their staffs who worked with me to extract materials—photographic and otherwise—from their holdings, but, in particular, to Carol Mead at the University of Texas at Austin’s Archives of American Mathematics and to Heather Riser in Special Collections at the University of Virginia. Carol warmly welcomed me on my numerous visits to Austin to plumb the depths of the expanding collection she oversaw, and Heather allowed me to serve as honorary archivist, bringing order to the previously uncatalogued but, for my project, much-needed Gordon T. Whyburn Papers. Special thanks also go to Michele Melancon, Assistant University Archivist at Louisiana State University. Although we have never met, Michele answered my (out of the blue) e-mail query about the mathematics faculty at LSU in the 1940s and early 1950s with a stunning and painstakingly extracted spreadsheet of names, dates, and titles that ultimately allowed me to compare and contrast two nascent research-level mathematics programs in the South (see chapter nine).

Second, friends and colleagues read my manuscript in whole or in part and offered constructive criticism and other food for thought. My husband and mathematics colleague, Brian Parshall, and my former mathematics colleague, Jim Rovnyak, scrutinized especially the mathematical exposition, while my friends, historians of science Joe Dauben and Albert Lewis, poured over the manuscript as a whole as did my mother, Mike Hunger. If Brian and Jim helped to root out mathematical obscurities, and Joe and Albert pushed me to address questions I had not thought to ask, my mother had her eagle eye out for what she euphemistically calls stylistic snags. Albert also held my hand and served as my technical expert and advisor in the final stages of readying everything for the press as I tried, during a pandemic and often in extreme frustration, to secure images and permissions that met the press’s specifications. Judy Green, fellow historian of mathematics formerly of Marymount University, and Elizabeth Meyer, my History Department friend and colleague, actually shared with me photographs from their own private collections thus sparing me the at times overwhelming task of tracking down copyright holders or otherwise determining fair use. Other friends, particularly my colleague in history, Tico Braun, and our fellow members of the Wednesday Seminar, helped me keep things in perspective with their lively conversations about things both academic and otherwise at our weekly get-togethers.

Last, but certainly not least, I thank everyone with Princeton University Press who helped me see this project into hard covers.

Karen Hunger Parshall

Charlottesville, VA

28 January, 2021

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE FOOTNOTES AND TABLES FOR AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL PUBLICATIONS

PART I

1920–1929: We are evidently on the verge of important steps forward.

—Roland Richardson, undated but early 1926

1

Surveying the 1920s Research Landscape

In December 1918, Edward Van Vleck was crazy to get back into real scientific work.¹ The University of Wisconsin mathematician had turned fifty-four just months after the United States had entered World War I in 1917 and had engaged in the war effort as an instructor for the Student Army Training Corps (SATC) on his home campus in Madison. With his usual nine hours of teaching a week augmented by two additional four-hour classes of freshman algebra targeted at SATC students, his war work, not surprisingly, had absorbed all of [his] spare time and energy. He had been completely diverted from the research in analysis that he had been faithfully pursuing since his days in Göttingen as a doctoral student of Felix Klein.²

Van Vleck was, in some sense, a member of the first generation of research mathematicians in the United States.³ Although he had done graduate work at the Johns Hopkins University before earning his Göttingen degree, he, like many other American mathematical aspirants born in the 1860s, had recognized that the kind of training he sought was largely unavailable in the United States in the early 1890s. He thus went abroad and returned with a personal mathematical research agenda as well as a dual sense of his academic mission. He was a teacher of undergraduate as well as graduate students, but he was also an active researcher. After 1904 and thanks to its then president, the geologist Charles Van Hise, the University of Wisconsin to which Van Vleck had moved in 1906 was also coming to share this ethos. It was one of the state universities that had begun to respond to changes in American higher education under way at least since 1876 with the founding of Hopkins in Baltimore. In fits and starts, other institutions followed suit into the opening decades of the twentieth century.

In many ways, World War I had served as a wake-up call to those in academe but, perhaps more importantly, to others in newly created philanthropies as well as to some within the Federal government. They had begun to recognize the value of original research for the welfare of the nation; they increasingly saw the need to support research financially. Savvy university administrators witnessed and steadily responded to this trend over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. They followed the money. Maybe the philanthropies were on to something. Maybe research should be more vigorously encouraged within the universities. Maybe faculties should be formed and sustained on the basis of research productivity and graduate training, first, and undergraduate teaching, second.

The war had also served as a break in business as usual. In its aftermath, there was a sense within the scientific community more broadly, but within the mathematical community, in particular, of entering into a new era in the development of our science.⁴ Every nerve should be strained to get our research back on its feet, in Roland Richardson’s view.⁵ He was apparently not alone in this conviction. He and other American mathematicians poured themselves into their work in the 1920s, but what did that mean? What were their main research interests? Where were those interests fostered? What, in short, was the lay of the American mathematical research landscape in the 1920s?

FIGURE 1.1. Oswald Veblen (1880–1960) (ca. 1915). (Photo from Wikimedia Commons.)

Mathematicians in Colleges and Universities

Mathematical research is done almost entirely by university and college teachers, Princeton’s Oswald Veblen patiently explained in 1924 to Vernon Kellogg, an entomologist and the permanent secretary of the National Research Council (NRC).⁶ Yet, he continued, [a] mathematics department in an American university has to deal with an enormous mass of freshmen, a very large number of sophomores, and with extremely small numbers of juniors, seniors and graduate students. Veblen was certainly in a position to know.

His father had been a professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Iowa, where the young Veblen had pursued his undergraduate studies. After a year at Harvard to earn a second B.A.—and presumably to supplement the more limited offerings that had been available to him in Iowa City—he proceeded to the University of Chicago in 1900, where his uncle, the iconoclastic economist and sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, happened then to be on the faculty.⁷ As a graduate student, Veblen imbued an ethos of research, research, research under his doctoral advisor E. H. Moore. His 1903 Ph.D. was followed by two years at Chicago as an associate in mathematics and, in 1905, by a preceptorship at Princeton.⁸ All the while, he churned out new results in what was then his main field, geometry. Veblen had thus experienced firsthand American higher mathematics education at levels from the so-so to the very best and had fully embodied the teacher-researcher mindset.

Moreover, from his highly privileged position as President of the American Mathematical Society from January 1923 through December 1924, he had become rather acutely conscious of the fact that the needs of mathematical research have not yet been brought to the attention of those, like Kellogg, whose position enables them to have a view of the strategy of Science.⁹ But if Veblen laid blame for this state of affairs, it was at the feet of the mathematicians themselves, for they have too easily assumed that an outside world which cannot understand the details of their work is not interested in its success. In 1924, having embraced the role of mathematical leader in the research as well as in the political sense, Veblen had many reasons to reject that assumption (see the next chapter), but he also appreciated the need clearly to articulate how mathematicians, as distinct from other types of scientists, fit into the modern college and university.

Since the beginnings of higher education in the United States, mathematics had been a key, required component of the undergraduate, liberal arts curriculum.¹⁰ By the 1920s, however, America’s universities—as opposed to its four-year colleges—had produced a cadre of college and university professors who were trained to do original research but who were hired largely to teach undergraduates. They populated a wide array of institutions.

The colonial colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Brown, and others—had, over the course of the final quarter of the nineteenth century and into the opening decades of the twentieth, begun to reorient themselves toward undergraduate and graduate instruction. Owing to their relatively long histories and to their traditionally collegiate focus, some of these schools experienced more difficulty than others in redefining themselves as actual universities in which faculties were expected actively to engage in research and publication. The same was true of some of the state-supported schools—like the Universities of Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas, Texas, and California at Los Angeles. After the 1862 Morrill Act provided funding for them, moreover, the Federal land-grant universities—such as the University of California in Berkeley, the University of Illinois, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Ohio State University—realized their more practical orientation at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. These types of schools were supplemented, in the so-called Gilded Age that followed the U.S. Civil War, by privately endowed women’s colleges—especially Pennsylvania’s Bryn Mawr—and other institutions—such as Hopkins, Clark University, and the University of Chicago—that set new standards particularly for graduate education and the production of original research.¹¹ Faculty members at both colleges and universities were coming to define themselves in terms of teaching and research.

For American mathematicians, this dual personality was both like and unlike that of their European counterparts. American and European mathematicians strove to do research and to publish the fruits of their labors, but in Europe—and especially in Germany and France where a system of Gymnasien and lycées, respectively, provided instruction at the freshman and sophomore levels—mathematicians were not involved in more introductory teaching.¹² Yet, in the United States, as Veblen explained to Kellogg, [a] man with good mathematical gifts and normal personal qualities has little trouble in obtaining as good a position as is available under our system, [b]ut when he obtains it he has a teaching schedule of from nine to fifteen hours a week as compared with three hours a week for his colleague in the Collège de France.¹³ Moreover, Veblen went on, he becomes tremendously interested in this teaching; he sees the manifold ways in which it could be improved, and he plays his part in the committees and other administrative devices which are trying to do the obvious tasks of the university in a better way. The American mathematician was thus able to spend only a relatively small fraction of time on research, given that a certain sense of responsibility dictated that he respond in a normal way to his environment.

A contradictory state of affairs had thus resulted in mathematics, although, at least as Veblen saw it, not at all in astronomy and much less so in the laboratory sciences. In mathematics, he explained, "we recognize ability in scientific research as a basis for university appointments but not as a primary occupation for the appointees." Astronomers, however, were often associated with observatories where observation and research defined their primary occupations, and although some physicists taught, they were also often responsible for maintaining research laboratories, whether in an academic or in an industrial setting.¹⁴ Veblen and many of his contemporaries believed that the time had come for colleges, but especially universities, to reverse the order of their priorities for mathematics, making research paramount and teaching secondary although still important.

They envisioned a system—with an implied hierarchy—in which those who have shown in their own environments that their impulse to research is a vital one would be freed from all other obligations and thenceforth paid for devoting their energies to research. Those whose impulse to research was less vital would focus on teaching. Indeed, this tension was already reflected in the existence of two mathematical societies: the AMS, founded in 1888, served the needs of the researchers, while the Mathematical Association of America, created in 1915, aimed at those engaged in undergraduate teaching.¹⁵ These two sets of mathematicians were by no means disjoint, but Veblen’s was an idealistic vision of the future of research-level mathematics that collided with the reality of college and university life at many, if not most, institutions in the 1920s.

Consider, for example, John Kline’s experiences at Yale following his 1916 Pennsylvania Ph.D. under University of Chicago–trained Robert L. Moore. At Penn, Kline had internalized the research mantra thanks to Moore—a mentee of Veblen and fellow student with him of E. H. Moore—and had taken it with him to Yale as an instructor during the 1918–1919 academic year. He was shocked by the attitudes he encountered there.

At a faculty meeting early in the second semester, the department chair, mathematical astronomer Ernest Brown, announced that there would be no more than one new entering graduate student and that not even that candidate was certain. When elder statesman and European-trained James Pierpont noted that the department used to graduate several first-rate Ph.D.s a year but that lately we have had only a few men and they mostly a poor lot, Brown replied that, in his view, that "was due to the fact… that the money Yale had to put out in fellowships and scholarships was very small as compared with Chicago, Harvard, and Princeton."¹⁶ When Pierpont pressed the issue, agreeing that that was likely part of the problem but questioning whether it was the whole of it, Brown constituted a committee of the younger men to study the situation and to make recommendations.

As one of those younger men, Kline got right to work canvassing his colleagues, but his findings dismayed him. William Longley, an assistant professor who had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1906 likely under the mathematical astronomer Forest Moulton, initially seemed interested in doing something for [the] encouraging of research here but then suggested that the decline in graduate students was because pure mathematics was a drudge on the market, [that] the pure mathematician had nothing that anyone else wanted and that perhaps we had been following false gods in patterning [ourselves] after the Germans in our highly specialized mathematics. Longley also offered the opinion "that most men… are enthusiastic research men when in graduate school but when they got out into teaching and got away from this influence, they gradually returned to their normal selves and a correct balance of things. Egbert Miles, another assistant professor and another Chicago Ph.D. but one who had earned his degree under Oskar Bolza in 1910, made Kline still sorer. Miles felt that pure mathematics was a subject which had no place in our university life at present, that we were at present engaged in building up a great industrial nation and that it was the business of the mathematician not to delve into pure science but to do effective teaching and apply mathematics to industrial problems."

Kline next moved on to the members of what he pejoratively termed the teaching gang. One of that number held that it is our business to look after the interests of the men who are going to be primarily interested in teaching, that there has been a false evaluation and that heads of departments have been unjust in making promotion depend only on research. In sum, James Whittenmore, like Kline an instructor but unlike him a European-trained mathematician who had nevertheless not taken a Ph.D., thought that the two of them were the only ones of the younger men who had any interest in doing research. In Kline’s view, if that was the attitude of the rest of the bunch, I should not be surprised if harm had already been done along the research lines.

Clearly, not all members of the younger generation were of a mind relative to the desirability and value of doing original research. Yale’s Department of Mathematics, unlike those at Chicago, Harvard, and Princeton, was thus not in a position as the 1920s opened to make a strong push into research, even though Pierpont, for one, hoped to convince the Yale administration to strengthen the Department of Mathematics in the sphere of Research in Pure Mathematics by making sufficient funds available to lure George Birkhoff from Harvard.¹⁷ That initiative failed. Birkhoff, then regarded as one of America’s best mathematicians, spent his career at Harvard. For Yale, as for numerous other schools, a strong research reorientation had evolved only by the 1940s.¹⁸

Kline left Yale after one year for an instructorship at the University of Illinois. There, he found a department much different from the one he had left on the East Coast. There, the geometers Edgar Townsend and Arthur Coble and the algebraists James Shaw and George Miller, among others, had been fostering what Kline deemed a good research atmosphere.¹⁹ Although Coble had just narrowly edged out Kline’s advisor, R. L. Moore, for an Illinois professorship, Kline had been asked for suggestions of good men and had been actively campaigning to get Moore’s name back in the running should a new senior position open up. Kline felt, moreover, that the primacy of research was fully appreciated at Illinois, whereas it had not been at Yale. As he put it to Moore, [c]ouldn’t we make this a centre if you came here? The University of Illinois, one of the newer land-grant institutions, had already embraced, at least in mathematics, a more modern research ethos by 1920.

At another land-grant, the Ohio State University, that transition was proving a bit more difficult. Kline’s academic brother, Raymond Wilder, had finished his Ph.D. under Moore at the University of Texas in Austin in 1923 and had accepted an associate professorship at Ohio State a year later. After settling into the routine there, he wrote to Moore to convey his impressions of the place. He was candid. [A]s you no doubt would guess, the dept. needs new life, he told Moore. "Outside of Kuhn, Bohannan & Weaver—dead wood

….

Of course, I am speaking of the dept. as it stands without MacDuffee. The latter is a good one—seems to have good ideas, and we’ve already formed a ‘dynamite squad’ or ‘flying wedge’ consisting of our two selves. It’s a case of stand together or drop into oblivion."²⁰ Harry Kuhn had earned his doctorate at Cornell in finite group theory under the direction of George Miller in 1901; Rosser Bohannan, chair of the department, had taken degrees in engineering from the University of Virginia in 1876 before proceeding for post-graduate studies abroad at Cambridge and Göttingen in the 1880s; James Weaver was a 1916 Ph.D. in geometry under Maurice Babb at Penn; and Cyrus MacDuffee had earned a doctorate in 1921 under Leonard Dickson at Chicago. It had been under Bohannan that the Ohio State department had begun hiring Ph.D.s and had started to offer more advanced courses, among them some graduate-level seminars.²¹

Despite the dead wood, Wilder thought that the department at Ohio State did have "some good points, chief of these being freedom. As a case in point, he was teaching both a freshman and an advanced course that he could run as [he] please[d]. Moreover, he hoped to teach his special field of topology in the second quarter and had two graduate students—likely looking boys, one an M.A. already—intending to take it."

All in all, though, the department needed improvement. MacDuffee expressed it very well, Wilder told Moore, " ‘I don’t want to say anything about any members of the dept., but, there aren’t enough vertebrae in Kuhn, Weaver, & Rasor put together to make one spinal column.’"²² He and MacDuffee therefore had to reform not only the character of the work in the dept., but the attitude of the adminstration toward the group as a whole.

That, in fact, was the self-appointed task of many in the 1920s—like Veblen, Kline, Wilder, and others—in departments of mathematics in all manner of colleges and universities around the United States. These mathematicians sought to convince their administrators to allow the pendulum to swing from teaching to research relative to professional advancement. Although in the 1920s it was not yet clear whether that swing would occur, a not insignificant number of America’s mathematicians endeavored to pursue their research and graduate instruction as they dutifully taught their undergraduate classes and served their institutions. In so doing, they contributed to a number of areas that filled the pages of journals at home and appeared side by side with European research in journals abroad. Veblen captured at work the most active and successful investigators among them in a 1928 snapshot that well reflected where American mathematicians were deemed, by at least some of their contemporaries, to be making the most important advances (see fig. 1.2).²³

A Recognized American Specialty: Analysis Situs

Analysis situs, or what would today be called topology, was considered in the 1920s perhaps the most distinctive of the American mathematical research specialities. In fact, as Göttingen’s Richard Courant saw it in 1927, it was [t]he one mathematical field in which America has had perhaps the greatest success.²⁴ It came, however, in two flavors. Combinatorial, that is, algebraic, topology treated space as comprised, in some sense, of visible building blocks that were stuck together in particular ways. It asked just how those building blocks were combined, or, in other words, what were their combinatorial properties? This type of topology—acknowledged by Courant—was fostered primarily at Princeton initially under Veblen’s leadership. The other kind—point-set topology and ignored by Courant—considered space microscopically as a collection of invisible points. It focused largely on continuity considerations from an axiomatic point of view and was developed as an American speciality thanks to the efforts principally of R. L. Moore, at Penn until his move in 1920 to the University of Texas in Austin. Each of these types of topology sought to isolate those properties of spaces that are preserved under homeomorphism, that is, under the action of a continuous, one-to-one and onto map with continuous inverse. Each thus also dealt with the properties of geometrical figures that remain invariant under such a map.²⁵ As students in the classes of E. H. Moore at Chicago in the first decade of the twentieth century, Veblen and Moore had both been influenced by the foundational, postulate-theoretic agenda that the elder Moore had then embraced.²⁶ Interestingly, each initially attacked his own brand of topology from, so to speak, the ground up.

FIGURE 1.2. Veblen’s list of America’s Research Mathematicians (1928). (Typed Facsimile of the document in Veblen Papers, Library of Congress.)

Veblen had come to the field from work, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, on the foundations, first, of geometry in general and, then, of projective geometry in particular. By 1912, his focus had shifted to an exploration of ideas that Henri Poincaré had only incompletely developed in a series of papers published between 1895 and 1904 on the concept of the connectivity of a space and on what Poincaré termed analysis situs. With Princeton student James Alexander, for example, Veblen co-authored a paper on "Manifolds ofN Dimensions in 1913 that explicitly aimed to establish some of the fundamental definitions and theorems as rigorously as possible, so as to furnish an introduction to the memoirs of Poincaré."²⁷ This paper marked Alexander’s publication debut as a topologist and set him on the research path he would continue to pursue throughout his career.

To fix the ideas and establish some terminology, consider Euclideann-space and take n + 1 points not all in the same (n − 1)-space as well as the 1-, 2-,

…,

(n − 1)-dimensional simplexes of which they are the vertices. These constitute a finite region inn-space called ann-dimensional simplex, that is, "that one among the regions into whichn-space is subdivided by n + 1 linearly independent (n − 1)-spaces which does not contain a point at infinity. For example, the interior of a triangle in a plane is a two-dimensional simplex, and the linear segment joining two points is a one-dimensional simplex." The n + 1 points are called the vertices, and the points on the boundary are not part of the simplex.

Now, consider a set of objects in one-to-one correspondence with the points in ann-dimensional simplex together with its boundary. The objects corresponding to the points of the simplex constitute ann-cell and the objects corresponding to the boundary of the simplex form then-cell’s boundary. Finally, consider the set Cn of cells consisting of αii-cells for

0 ≤ i ≤ n.

Cn is called a complex if everyi-cell, for

i > 0,

is made up entirely of cells of dimensions less thani and if everyi-cell, for

i < n,

is on the boundary of some (i + 1)-cell. The ordered set of points in the