scholarly journals Impersonation and personification in mid-twentieth century mathematics

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-436
Author(s):  
Michael J. Barany
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
Authorial Identity ◽  
Scientific Authorship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Mathematics

Pseudonymous mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki and his lesser-known counterpart E.S. Pondiczery, devised respectively in France and in Princeton in the mid-1930s, together index a pivotal moment in the history of modern mathematics, marked by international infrastructures and institutions that depended on mathematicians’ willingness to play along with mediated personifications. By pushing these norms and practices of personification to their farcical limits, Bourbaki’s and Pondiczery’s impersonators underscored the consensual social foundations of legitimate participation in a scientific community and the symmetric fictional character of both fraud and integrity in scientific authorship. To understand authorial identity and legitimacy, individual authors’ conduct and practices matter less than the collective interpersonal relations of authorial assertion and authentication that take place within disciplinary institutions.

scholarly journals On the centenary of Tavrichesky University: the birth of Iranian higher education in Crimea

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-116
Author(s):  
A.N. Sukhorukov
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Academic Education ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

This article discusses the history of the formation and development of teaching Persian language and literature in the Crimea in the first half of the twentieth century, points to the transition from episodic teaching of the Persian language in classical madrasas to the provision of academic education in the first university of Crimea. Despite the constant transformations of the university and its structural subdivisions, the Persian language department continued to work from 1921 to 1929. Professor Philonenko was the constant leader of the Persian direction throughout this time. When writing the article, the author used rare sources that had not been widely spread in the scientific community before.

scholarly journals “Lithuanian Athens”. Ludwik Janowski’s versions of the history of Vilnius University

2021 ◽  
pp. 344-368
Author(s):  
Urszula Kowalczuk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Vilnius University ◽  
Scientific Reflection ◽  
Cultural Historian ◽  
Specific Synthesis

The subject of this article is scientific reflection about the works on the history of Vilnius University had written in the first two decades of the twentieth century by the cultural historian, Ludwik Janowski (1878-1921), who was associated with the scientific community in Kiev and Krakow, and in 1919-1921 he was a professor at The Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. Janowski’s interest on the history of Vilnius University was a kind of a research passion all his life. Though he failed to write a historiographic synthesis that it has been planning. In his works he tried to correct and supplement the research on the history of Vilnius University. His studies and books compose a specific synthesis in fragments, which shows in a multi-variant narrative the most important stages and factors in the development of this great center of science and culture.

scholarly journals The Research of the Assyrian Diaspora in Central Russia on the Example of the Communities of the Ryazan Region Cities

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-47
Author(s):  
Sergei Sergeevich Mikhailov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Local Group ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Central Russia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Professional Occupation ◽  
The Village

The history of the Assyrians who settled on the territory of Russia is an important and understudied topic. The purpose of the article is to acquaint readers and the scientific community with the results of the study of the Assyrian diaspora in the Ryazan region. The local Assyrian communities formed in the 1920s-1930s were studied. Ryazan region of Russia. Using the methods of field research, we find out that in Ryazan in the twentieth century, two small Assyrian necropolises arose – at the historical Lazarevskoye and Skorbyashensky cemeteries. The author inspected the graves preserved for 2019–2020. The Ryazan Assyrian necropolis does not differ from the places of compact burials of representatives of this people in other cities, which were examined by the author. Nevertheless, it is very important for the study of this diaspora. The results of the study showed that the Assyrian people were subdivided by the beginning of the twentieth century. for two dozen subethnos (tribes), representatives of some tribal and groups created diasporas. Regarding Ryazan, this is a large part, natives of the independent («ashiret») region of Djilu (the Jilvai tribe), the Maliks of Djilu Gorta (Big Djilu), from the villages of Alsan (local group of alasnaya), Zirini (grain), Midi (copper). A rather small number of families turned out to be in Russia – natives of the Ashiret independent Maliks – Thuma (the Thumnaya tribe), as well as natives of the small village of Shvava, whose inhabitants make up a small group of Shavetnaya. In the latter case, we have established the name of the genus-otzhah. Ryazan thumnaya, judging by what we know about their fellow tribesmen in neighboring Moscow, Tula, as well as in Georgia, most likely came from the village of Myazrya (maser group). The paper presents facts of the history of small Assyrian communities in other cities of the Ryazan region – Kasimov, Ryazhsk and Mikhailov. The main professional occupation of the representatives of the Assyrian communities in the 1920–1970s was shoe cleaning. It is concluded that the Assyrians, despite the small number of the diaspora, played a role in the urban culture of Ryazan in the twentieth century. In the future, we intend to expand the resources of the research base and continue to study various aspects of the life of the Assyrians in Russia.

Presidential address Experts and publishers: writing popular science in early twentieth-century Britain, writing popular history of science now

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER J. Bowler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Science Writing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Popular Science Writing ◽  
Popular Writing

The bulk of this address concerns itself with the extent to which professional scientists were involved in popular science writing in early twentieth-century Britain. Contrary to a widespread assumption, it is argued that a significant proportion of the scientific community engaged in writing the more educational type of popular science. Some high-profile figures acquired enough skill in popular writing to exert considerable influence over the public's perception of science and its significance. The address also shows how publishers actively sought ‘expert’ authors for popular material, but at the same time controlled what was published in accordance with their perception of what would sell. At a more popular level of writing there were many semi-professional authors who, while not active scientists, exploited close contacts with the scientific community. Here there was a strong emphasis on the practical applications of science.The address concludes by suggesting parallels between popular science writing in this period and the present state of popular writing about the history of science.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

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