Breaking onto the International Scene

Abstract

This chapter investigates how the United States engaged in the international politics of mathematics. 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. The chapter examines how they could change European perceptions of them as students, arguing that one way would be for key Europeans to come to the United States in order to experience their mathematical community firsthand. The chapter also recounts America's attempt to showcase American mathematics at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) held in Strasbourg in 1920. The chapter examines the revival of the ICMs in the 1920s which reflected a partial resumption of international mathematical contacts in the aftermath of World War I. It also looks at the perception of a maturing American mathematical research community through the G. H. Hardy-Oswald Veblen exchange.