Alma Steingart Assistant Professor, History, Columbia University Alma Steingart researches the interplay between politics and mathematical rationalities. Steingart’s second book manuscript, Accountable Democracy: Mathematical Reasoning and Representative Democracy in America, 1920 to Now, examines how mathematical thought and computing technologies have impacted electoral politics in the United States in the twentieth century. Focusing on the census, apportionment, congressional redistricting, ranked voting, and election forecasts, she investigates how changing computational practices, from statistical modeling to geometrical analysis, insinuated themselves into the most basic definitions of “fair representation” of the American electorate. In Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism (2023, University of Chicago Press), Steingart excavates the influence of axiomatic reasoning on mid-century American intellectual thought, from the natural and social sciences to literary criticism and modern design. Professor Steingart was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a predoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Participant In: Mathematics and Other Realities Saturday, December 7, 2019 at 2:30pm Past Event Watch the video » The question of what the world in which we live consists of is as old as mankind itself. In philosophical jargon, this is the question of the ontological basis of reality. With the growing success of physics and other sciences, the idea of one fundamental ontology, that of particles and fields, became dominant as a… read more » Permanence and Impermanence of Mathematical Concepts October 21st, 2023 at 2:30pm EST Past Event Watch the video » What do you think of when you think of the number five? Do you think of symbol like 5, a pattern like ⁙, or the fifth item on a list? Today, the concept of number is fixed and eternal, unlinked to anything in the universe. But history shows that mathematics is anything but fixed. In… read more »
Mathematics and Other Realities Saturday, December 7, 2019 at 2:30pm Past Event Watch the video » The question of what the world in which we live consists of is as old as mankind itself. In philosophical jargon, this is the question of the ontological basis of reality. With the growing success of physics and other sciences, the idea of one fundamental ontology, that of particles and fields, became dominant as a… read more »
Permanence and Impermanence of Mathematical Concepts October 21st, 2023 at 2:30pm EST Past Event Watch the video » What do you think of when you think of the number five? Do you think of symbol like 5, a pattern like ⁙, or the fifth item on a list? Today, the concept of number is fixed and eternal, unlinked to anything in the universe. But history shows that mathematics is anything but fixed. In… read more »