Michael J. Barany
Apology
I haven't updated this page in a while. Some more recent publications to be posted soon, and the forthcoming items are out now.
Reader Guide
I have organized my publications chronologically, with the most recent at the top. Icons next to the titles indicate:
- Recommended expository writing and essays for public audiences.
- Recommended academic writing.
Below my publications I have included some older unpublished essays that others have found useful, and that some have even cited in their own work, but whose prospects or timeline for publication are currently hazy. After those, there are links to media features based extensively on interviews with me or research I provided.
Writing
2023
- A "Truly International" Discipline: Adverbs, ideals, and the reinvention of international mathematics. Isis 114(4), 791-816. doi:10.1086/727706. Preprint [pdf].
- Une discipline "vraiment international": Adverbes, idéaux et la reinvention des mathématiques internationales. Trans. Pierre Verschueren. Mathématiques, communautés et institutions, ed. Verschueren. Seuil. This is a French translation of an expanded version of the article in Isis.
- The treachery of small numbers. The Sociological Review Magazine. Online (open access).
- See also Letters to the Editor: Numbers, October 2023. The Sociological Review Magazine, online.
- Towards collective academic governance at Edinburgh. Interview by Sean McMahon. Council for the Defence of British Universities, Governance blog series, online.
- Practice Makes Perfectoid: Pasts, futures, and the historiography of contemporary mathematics. Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, ed. Sriraman. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-19071-2_83-1. Preprint [pdf]
- Inverting Hierarchies: The sociology of mathematical practice. With Milena Kremakova. Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, ed. Sriraman. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-19071-2_87-1. Preprint [pdf].
- On Remediation: Media, repair, and the discipline of fantasy in the theory and practice of algorithmic modernity. Osiris 38: 40-57. doi:10.1086/725090. Preprint [pdf].
- Natural Sciences. With Emily Kern. The Interwar World, ed. Tworek and Denning. Routledge, pp. 442-458.
- Placing a Global Mathematical Literature: Geography, Infrastructure, and Information in the Mid-Century Zentralblatt für Mathematik and Mathematical Reviews. Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. Zack and Waszek. Springer, pp. 199-212. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-21494-3_12 Preprint [pdf].
- 'Some call it Arsmetrike, and some Awgryme': Misprision and precision in algorithmic thinking and learning in 1543 and beyond. Algorithmic Modernity, ed. Morgan Ames and Massimo Mazzotti. Oxford, pp. 31-44. Preprint [pdf, 215k].
Reviews
- Beeley, Nasifoglu, and Wardhaugh, eds., Reading mathematics in early modern Europe. Routledge, 2021. The Seventeenth Century 38:5, 922-924, doi:10.1080/0268117X.2023.2240617. Preprint [pdf].
- The vexing problem of ancient Greek mathematics. (Review of Netz, A New History of Greek Mathematics, Cambridge 2022.) The Spectator, 4 February.
2022
- Nombrar y traducir: Redes y organizaciones mundiales de la matemática en el siglo XX. Políticas de la Ciencia, ed. Mandressi and Markarian. Universidad de la República, pp. 175-186. Preprint [pdf].
- Mathematical Institutions and the 'In' of the Association for Women in Mathematics. Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics, ed. Beery, Greenwald, and Kessel. Springer, pp. 325-341. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-82658-1_32. Preprint [pdf].
- What is Internationalism for? Notes from the archives of Damodar D. Kosambi. Bhāvanā 6(3). Online (open access).
2021
- Essay review of Riehm and Hoffman, Turbulent Times in Mathematics (American Mathematical Society and Fields Institute, 2011). The Mathematical Intelligencer. doi:10.1007/s00283-021-10059-9 (open access).
- The mathematical pranksters behind Nicolas Bourbaki. JSTOR Daily, 24 March.
- Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona: Incarnations and Contestations. Co-edited with Kirsti Niskanen. Palgrave.
- Introduction: The Scholar Incarnate. With Kirsti Niskanen. Chapter 1, preprint available on request.
- "A Young Man's Game": Youth, gender, play, and power in the personae of mid-twentieth century global mathematics. Chapter 2, Preprint [pdf, 315k].
2020
- Histories of Mathematical Practice: Reconstruction, Genealogy, and the Unruly Pasts of Ruly Knowledge. ZDM Mathematics Education 52, pp. 1075-1086. DOI:10.1007/s11858-020-01175-5.
- Impersonation and personification in mid-twentieth century mathematics. In "Historicizing Fraud and Research Integrity," ed. Cyrus Mody, Lissa Roberts, and Otto Sibum, History of Science 58(4), pp. 417-436. doi:10.1177/0073275320924571 (CC-BY open access).
- Abstract Relations: Bibliography and the Infra-structures of Modern Mathematics. In "Enabling Mathematical Cultures," ed. Benedikt Loewe, Ursula Martin, and Alison Pease, Synthese. Open-access e-print, doi:10.1007/s11229-020-02683-3.
- "All of these political questions": Anticommunism, racism, and the origin of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Preprint [pdf, 155k].
- Organizational Practice in the Heterolingual Archive [Prática organizacional no arquivo heterolingual]. Em Construção: arquivos de epistemologia histórica e estudos de ciêcia 7, 19-27. DOI:10.12957/emconstrucao.2020.50367.
- Louis Nirenberg (1925-2020): Virtuoso mathematician who transformed the study of partial differential equations. With Brit Shields. Nature 578, 20 February, p. 359.
Reviews
- Goldstein, Long-term history and ephemeral configurations. Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians – Rio de Janeiro 2018. Vol. I. Plenary lectures. World Sci. Publ. 2018, pp. 487-522. Mathematical Reviews MR3966737.
- Let's leave philosophers to puzzle over the reality of numbers. Review of: Zellini, The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men: A Cultural History, trans. Carnell and Segre. Allen Lane, 2020. The Spectator 7 March.
- Kjeldsen, A multiple perspective approach to history of mathematics: mathematical programming and Rashevsky's early development of mathematical biology in the twentieth century. In: Schubring (ed.), Interfaces between mathematical practices and mathematical education. Springer, 2019, pp. 143-167. Mathematical Reviews MR3930843.
2019
- Rockefeller Bureaucracy and Circumknowing Science in the Mid-Twentieth Century. International Journal for History Culture and Modernity 7, 779-796. doi:10.18352/hcm.592
- The Officer's Three Names: the formal, familiar, and bureaucratic in the transnational history of scientific fellowships. How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, edited by John Krige. University of Chicago Press, 2019, pp. 254-280. ISBN: 9780226605999. Preprint [pdf, 200k].
- Afterword: Reflections on writing the transnational history of science and technology. With John Krige. How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, edited by John Krige. University of Chicago Press, 2019, pp. 411-418. ISBN: 9780226605999. Preprint [425k].
- Michael F. Atiyah (1929-2019): Mathematician who transformed the fields he brought together. Nature 566, 7 February, p. 40. [free read-only link].
Reviews
- Klin and Woldar, The strongly regular graph with parameters (100, 22, 0, 6): hidden history and beyond. Acta Univ. M. Belii, Ser. Math. 25, 2017, 5-62. zbMATH Zbl 1430.05137.
- Richter, John Wallis and the Catholics: confessional and theological antagonism in Wallis's mathematics and philosophy. Notes and Records of the Royal Society 72(4), 2018, 487-503. zbMATH Zbl 1429.01010.
- The Art of Conjecturing: On Karen Olsson's "The Weil Conjectures". Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 December 2019.
- Stedall, Narratives of algebra in early printed European texts. In: Rommevaux et al. (eds.), Pluralite de l'algebre a la Renaissance. Honore Champion, 2012, pp. 217-235. Mathematical Reviews MR3889073.
- Matthew Jones, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage. Chicago, 2016. Annals of the History of Computing 41(2), 2019, pp. 69-70. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2019.2913954.
- To Infinity and Beyond: The Power of Calculus. Review of Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 May 2019.
- Bell and Blasjo, Pietro Mengoli's 1650 proof that the harmonic series diverges, Mathematics Magazine 91(5), 2018, pp. 341-347. Mathematical Reviews MR3885970.
- Parshall, The American Mathematical Monthly (1894-1919): A new journal in the service of mathematics and its educators. In: Zack et al. (eds.), Research in history and philosophy of mathematics. The CSHPM 2015 annual meeting in Washington, D.C., USA, August, 2015. Birkhäuser, 2016, pp. 193-2014. zbMATH Zbl 06995260.
2018
- Michael (Mihaly) and Kate (Katalin) Barany - A Scientist Couple. With George Barany. Muscle Contraction: a Hungarian Perspective, ed. Miklos Kellermayer. Budapest: Semmelweis, 2018, pp. 29-41.
- Integration by Parts: Wordplay, Abuses of Language, and Modern Mathematical Theory on the Move. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 48(3), 2018, pp. 259-299. [pdf, 400k].
- A postwar guide to winning a science grant. Physics Today, 20 March 2018, online. doi:10.1063/PT.6.4.20180320a.
- The Fields Medal should return to its roots. Nature 553, 18 January 2018, pp. 271-273. [free read-only link]. To appear in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2019.
Reviews
- Cogliati and Mastrolia, Cartan, Schouten and the search for connection. Historia Mathematica 45(1), 2018, pp. 39-74. zbMATH Zbl 06852368.
- Culture's essential tension. Review of: Karine Chemla and Evelyn Fox Keller, ed., Cultures without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge. Duke, 2017. Metascience 27(2), 2018, pp. 275-278, doi:10.1007/s11016-018-0286-2.
2017
- From Nancy to Copenhagen to the World: The internationalization of Laurent Schwartz and his theory of distributions. With Anne-Sandrine Paumier and Jesper Lutzen. Historia Mathematica 44(4), 2017, pp. 367-394. doi:10.1016/j.hm.2017.04.002 MR3716327 Zbl 1379.01018; Preprint [pdf, 475k].
- Letter to the Editor: More to Internationalism than Migration. Notices of the American Mathematical Society 64, no. 10 (November 2017): 1133-1134.
- Lived abstraction, making senses. Video and edited transcript, OBJECT AMERICA: Observation through the Senses, Observational Practices Lab, Parsons School of Design, The New School, NY, 13 October, 2017.
- Math: Still Not Everywhere. Guest post, Mathbabe.org blog, ed. O'Neil, 16 August, 2017.
- Of Polyhedra and Pyjamas: Platonism and induction in meaning-finitist mathematics. What is a mathematical concept? edited by Elizabeth de Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, and Alf Coles. Cambridge University Press, 2017, ch. 1 (pp. 19-35). MR3644281. Preprint [pdf, 160k].
- The World War II Origins of Mathematics Awareness. Notices of the American Mathematical Society 64(4), April 2017, pp. 363-367 [pdf]. doi:10.1090/noti1506, MR3617313 Zbl 1366.01015. Reprinted in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018, ed. Pitici. Princeton University Press, 2018, pp. 197-204.
Reviews
- Silvia de Toffoli, 'Chasing' the Diagram--the use of visualizations in algebraic reasoning. The Review of Symbolic Logic 10(1), March 2017, 158-186. Mathematical Reviews MR3620013, [pdf, 90k].
- Andrea Del Centina, Poncelet's porism: a long history of renewed discoveries. Archive for History of Exact Sciences 70(1-2), 2016, pp. 1-173. Mathematical Reviews MR3437893 and MR3458182, retracted.
- D. Choimet and H. Queffelec, Twelve Landmarks of Twentieth-Century Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Mathematical Reviews MR3445361, [pdf, 165k].
2016
- Fellow Travelers and Traveling Fellows: The intercontinental shaping of modern mathematics in mid-twentieth century Latin America. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46, no. 5 (2016), pp. 669-709. [pdf, 380k]; Zbl 1365.01030.
- Math Isn't Everywhere. Scientific American Guest Blog, 16 August, 2016.
- Distributions in Postwar Mathematics. PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2016. UMI/ProQuest 10167544. [pdf, 2.5m]
- Remunerative Combinatorics: Mathematicians and their Sponsors in the Mid-Twentieth Century. Mathematical Cultures: The London Meetings 2012-2014, edited by Brendan Larvor. Basel: Birkhauser, 2016, pp. 329-346. Preprint [pdf, 220k].
Reviews
- Christopher Hollings, Mathematics Across the Iron Curtain: A History of the Algebraic Theory of Semigroups. Providence: American Mathematical Society, 2014. British Journal for the History of Science, 49, 2016, pp. 140-141. doi:10.1017/S0007087416000194. Preprint [pdf, 70k]
2015
- A Dusty Discipline. With Donald MacKenzie. The Best Writing on Mathematics 2015, edited by Mircea Pitici. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 1-6. Preprint [pdf, 90k].
- The Uses and Abuses of Self-Flagellation. Guest post, Show and Tell, a blog on philosophy pedagogy, ed. Larvor and Lippitt. 25 July, 2015.
- The Myth and the Medal. Notices of the American Mathematical Society 62(1), January 2015, pp. 15-20 [pdf]. doi:10.1090/noti1195, MR3308164 Zbl 1338.01009; Preprint [pdf, 150k], with supporting bibliography. Selected for Chinese translation for Mathematical Advances in Translation.
Reviews
- Viktor Blasjo, The myth of Leibniz's proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus. Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde 5/16(1), 2015, pp. 46-50. Mathematical Reviews, MR3310007, [pdf, 105k].
- Ian Hacking, Why is there Philosophy of Mathematics at all? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. In: British Journal for the History of Science, 48 (2015), pp. 686-687. doi:10.1017/S0007087415000692. Preprint [pdf, 64k].
- Michael Harris, Mathematics without apologies: Portrait of a problematic vocation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Mathematical Reviews, MR3289987 [pdf, 117k], [Harris's reply].
- Bussotti and Pisano, Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica `Jesuit' Edition: the tenor of a huge work. Rendiconti Lincei Matematica e Applicazioni 25 (2014), 413-444. Mathematical Reviews, MR3283397 [pdf, 180k].
- Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux / Scientific American and London: Oneworld, 2014. In: British Journal for the History of Science, 48 (2015), pp. 362-364. doi:10.1017/S0007087415000096.
2014
- Savage Numbers and the Evolution of Civilization in Victorian Prehistory. British Journal for the History of Science, 47(2): 239-255, June 2014 (published online 9 August, 2013). doi:10.1017/S0007087413000356 (BJHS online version of record [pdf, 525k]).
- How Math Got Its `Nobel.' The New York Times, August 10, 2014, Sunday Review Op-Ed, p. SR12 (online August 8).
- Chalk: Materials and Concepts in Mathematics Research. With Donald MacKenzie. Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, edited by Catelijne Coopmans, Michael Lynch, Janet Vertesi, and Steve Woolgar. MIT Press, 2014, ch. 6 (pp. 107-129). Preprint [pdf, 1.7m]. doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262525381.003.0006.
Reviews
- Turner and Sorensen, Cultivating the herb garden of Scandinavian mathematics: the congresses of Scandinavian mathematicians, 1909-1925. Centaurus 55 (2013), no. 4, 385-411. 01A74 (01A60). Mathematical Reviews, MR3138534 [pdf, 104k].
2013
- Stuck in the Middle: Cauchy's intermediate value theorem and the history of analytic rigor. Notices of the American Mathematical Society 60(10), November 2013, pp. 1334-1338 [pdf]. doi:10.1090/noti1049, MR3135942 Zbl 1322.26001. Reprinted in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014, edited by Mircea Pitici (Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 228-238.
- How History Shaped the Global Mathematician. LiveScience/NSF Behind the Scenes article, 21 December, 2013.
Reviews
- Helene Mialet, Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. In: British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013), pp. 544-546. doi:10.1017/S0007087413000630.
- Benjamin Wardhaugh (ed.), The History of the History of Mathematics: Case Studies for the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. In: British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013), pp. 344-345. doi:10.1017/S0007087413000204.
2012
- `That small and unsensible shape': Visual Representations of the Euclidean Point in Sixteenth-Century Print. Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 6 (2012), pp. 148-159. doi:10.4245/sponge.v6i1.16137, [pdf, 500k].
- Creating a World Without Numbers. BSHS Viewpoint 97, February 2012, p. 9.
Reviews
- Kuhn was Right (review of the 2012 Princeton workshop Structure at 50: Assessing and Reassessing Kuhn and his Legacy), American Science: A Team Blog, Forum for the History of Science in America, 12 November, 2012.
2011
- God, King, and Geometry: Revisiting the Introduction to Cauchy's Cours d'Analyse. Historia Mathematica 38(3), August 2011, pp. 368-388. doi:10.1016/j.hm.2010.12.001 (preprint [pdf, 270k]), MR2812969 (2012e:01006), Zbl 1221.01065.
- The Numbers Game. [Web title: One, Two, Many: The Prehistory of Counting.] New Scientist 4808:43-45 (16 April, 2011). Available on their website (subscription required) and from Science Direct (doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(11)60869-5; different subscription required).
- Contributing translator to Roshdi Rashed (ed. Nader El-Bizri) Founding Figures and Commentators in Arabic Mathematics: A History of Arabic Sciences and Mathematics Volume 1. London: Routledge, 2011, ISBN: 978-0-415-58217-9.
2010
- Translating Euclid's Diagrams into English, 1551-1571. In: Philosophical Aspects of Symbolic Reasoning in Early Modern Mathematics. (Studies in Logic, vol. 26.) Albrecht Heeffer and Maarten Van Dyck, editors. London: College Publications (2010), ch. 4 (pp. 125-163), ISBN: 978-1-84890-017-2 ([pdf, 1.7m]), Zbl 1255.01006.
- Great Pyramid metrology and the material politics of basalt. Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 4 (2010), pp. 45-60. doi:10.4245/sponge.v4i1.11897, [pdf, 670k].
- Mathematical Research in Context. MSc dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2010. [pdf, 3.1m]
- `[B]ut this is blog maths and we're free to make up conventions as we go along': Polymath1 and the Modalities of `Massively Collaborative Mathematics.' Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, Gdansk, Poland, 2010. New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/1832772.1832786. (Author's version, posted by permission of ACM for personal use, not for redistribution: [pdf, 200k]. The paper is also available without registration on the conference website.)
2009 and earlier
- Prehistories of Counting. MPhil dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2009. [pdf, 210k]
- Spectral Operators on the Sierpinski Gasket I. With Adam Allan and Robert S. Strichartz. Complex Variables and Elliptic Equations, 54(6): 521-543, 2009. doi:10.1080/17476930802272978, MR2537254 (2010f:28011), Zbl 1188.28006.
- Proof and its Putting: Mathematics, Rigor, and Testimony. AB thesis, Cornell University, 2008. [pdf, 770k]
- Synthetic routes to, and mechanistic understanding of, dithiasuccinoyl (Dts)-amines and chlorocarbonyl carbamoyl disulfanes. Lead author, with M.M. Corey, M.C. Hanson, R.S. Majerle, R.P. Hammer, and G. Barany. In: Understanding Biology using Peptides. Proceedings of the 19th American Peptide Symposium (S.E. Blondelle, Ed.). Springer, New York, NY, pp. 196-197, 2006. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-26575-9_82. See also M.J. Henley, M.J. Barany, L. Chen, R.P. Hammer, A.M. Schrader, V.G. Young, Jr., and G. Barany, Mechanistic Insights Into the Zumach-Weiss-Kuhle Synthesis of Dithiasuccinoyl (Dts)-Protected Amines. In: Proceedings of the 24th American Peptide Symposium (Ved Srivastava, Andrei Yudin, and Michal Lebl, Eds.). American Peptide Society, pp. 266-267, 2015. doi:10.17952/24APS.2015.266.
- Efficient Synthesis of 1,2,4-Dithiazolidine-3,5-diones [Dithiasuccinoyl-Amines] from Bis(chlorocarbonyl)disulfane Plus Bis(trimethylsilyl)amines. Lead author, with Robert P. Hammer, R.B. Merrifield, and George Barany. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 127:508-509, 2005. With Supporting Information: 8 pages. doi:10.1021/ja0455446.
- An efficient, direct method for synthesis of dithiasuccinoyl (Dts) amines. Lead author, with Robert P. Hammer, R.B. Merrifield, and George Barany. In: Bridges Between Disciplines: Proceedings of the Third International and the Twenty-Eighth European Peptide Symposium (Martin Flegel, Mati Fridkin, Chaim Gilon, and Jirina Slaninova, eds.), pp. 3-4, 2005.
- Science's Language Problem. Business Week, 16 March, 2005.
Unpublished Essays
- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard. With Henry Cowles. Preprint on request.
- `That which hath no part': The Euclidean Point at the Dawn of English Geometry [pdf, 320k].
- Slightly Scalene Mathematics [pdf, 530k].
- One and a Half Legs to Stand On: The grounds and objects of mathematical proofs [pdf, 100k].
- Quantitative Epistemology and the Structure of Logical Knowledge [pdf, 360k].
- Proofs, refutations and heuristics: historical and essentialist standpoints in Lakatos's philosophy of mathematics (with Jiri Hudecek) [pdf, 40k].
- Computer Experiments in Harmonic Analysis [pdf, 425k].
Featured in Media by Others
- Ben Orlin, The Forgotten Dream of the Fields Medal. Math With Bad Drawings (blog), 25 July 2018.
- Michael Price, The Fields Medal was never meant for `the greatest mathematical genius.' Science, 16 January, 2018.
- David Brooks, Just as surely as (a+b)=(b+a), mathematicians love their blackboards. Concord Monitor (New Hampshire), 3 January, 2017. Story featured on New Hampshire Public Radio, Why Do Mathematicians Love Blackboards So Much?
- Eduardo Delgado, Matematico Massera fue investigado por el FBI. El Pais (Montevideo, Uruguay), 1 June, 2015.