The subjects of modernism : mathematics, art, and the politics of value in twentieth-century United States

My dissertation illuminates the status of mathematical knowledge in relation to other intellectual domains and racialized social forms-particularly American Orientalism-in the twentieth-century United States. Observers and practitioners have long engaged in drawing relations between mathematics and the arts. Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, when mathematicians reconceived mathematics around notions of abstraction, formalism, and "made" theories bearing no necessary relationship to the empirical world, understandings of the relationship of mathematics to the arts changed. Historians of mathematics, mathematicians, and historians of art have since referred to these twentieth-century intellectual changes as a "modernist" transformation. They refer to mathematical modernism in terms of metaphors that reflect shared values of being autonomous, creative, and a form of self-expression.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Kim, Clare Seungyoon.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Kaiser.

• Program in Science, Technology and Society.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124069

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/124069