Rockefeller and the Internationalizaton of Mathematics Between the Two World Wars
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Author(s): R. Siegmund-Schultze
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3764364688
Format: hardback
341pp
Price: SFr 128
Review Date: 25 June 2001
Review: Philanthropic funding of science, as opposed to state and corporate investment, was more important between the wars than it is now. This account draws on the documented processes behind personal and institutional involvement in philanthropies. The most important contributions to international mathematical communication of the Rockefeller family were the activities of the International Education Board (IEB). This book looks at the co-operation between mathematics and Rockefeller philanthropists in dealing with problems of international communication in mathematics in the decades before the Second World War. It begins by looking at the political and economic conditions for international scientific collaboration after the first World War and goes on to examine the ideological and political positions and preconceptions of IEB-functionaries with respect to European science in the mid-1920s. Based on this, the author considers the concrete historical practice of the IEB, and, in particular, the fellowship programme. The grants made by the IEB to found mathematical institutes in Paris and Göttigen are discussed in detail. The IEB was dissolved in 1928, but the fellowship programme continued until the 1930s. After 1933 the Foundation implemented an emergency programme for refugees from Europe. In the period of war preparedness, and even more during the war, the Rockefeller Foundation became increasingly interested in subjects bordering mathematics, such as engineering mathematics.