Like many of the cultures it studies, the Department of History of Mathematics has had innovative leaders, a golden era and, inevitably, a fall from glory. This year could witness the end of a department historically considered one of Brown's most interesting and unique programs. Professor of History of Mathematics David Pingree, the department's chair, plans to retire by the end of this year, and the administration may use this to transition the current department to a new setup.
With only one full-time professor since 1986, the history of mathematics department is the smallest department at Brown, as well as the only one of its kind in the world. Pingree himself does not teach classes, instead working individually with graduate students. Alice Slotsky, a visiting assistant professor from Yale, has taught Akkadian and Sumerian at Brown since 1999 and is the only person in the department currently teaching courses.
"At its peak, four professors were here," Slotsky said. "But no one replaced them after they transferred or retired."
The department's unconventional size has proved to be a major factor in the administration's deliberations regarding its future. To further complicate things, Pingree plans to retire by the end of this school year, knowing that his position will not be filled once it is vacated.
"A one-person department is a rather peculiar department," said Provost Robert Zimmer. "It doesn't give undergrad or grad students the same cohort or intellectual framework" as a larger department.
In recent years, the history of mathematics department has come under scrutiny in the administration's assessments of the ancient studies programs.
Zimmer said that Brown is trying to "configure the ancient studies to maximize research possibilities and benefits to students. ... We're expanding this area considerably."
Where exactly the History of Mathematics Department will end up, however, is undecided. "We're interested in continuing for the foreseeable future the University's intellectual interest in this area," Zimmer said, later asking: "Is the best way to preserve that intellectual activity as its own department or within another?"
The provost denied that any decisions were based on enrollment or financial figures. "We're not losing a part of the University - the configurations are evolving," he said.
Beginning next fall, the ancient language of Akkadian will be taught by Slotsky through the Department of Classics.
Pingree believes that whatever changes the administration makes will diminish the opportunities for the type of studies in the history of mathematics that flourished at Brown a few decades ago. "In the '70s, we were under a very different administration, and that administration respected what we did," he said.
Slotsky, too, is critical of the University's pushing the history of mathematics to the back burner while allocating resources to other departments. "Why not put it into something that's unique?"
History of the History
The history of the department itself is unique but relatively short, dating back only to the middle of the 20th century. Otto Neugebauer, a member of the Mathematische Institut at Göttingen and considered the world's foremost historian of Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Greek mathematics, fled Germany when Hitler came to power in 1934, relocating to Copenhagen. When the Nazis threatened Denmark in 1939, R.G.D. Richardson, dean of the graduate school and secretary of the American Mathematical Society helped arrange for Neugebauer to teach in Brown's Department of Mathematics.
During a stay in Chicago, Neugebauer met the Assyriologist Abraham Sachs, whom he brought back to Brown. In 1948 President Henry Wriston created the Department of the History of Mathematics to provide an appropriate setting for these two scholars and to dissuade Sachs from taking a position at Johns Hopkins University. Soon, the department was training graduate students from around the world and conducting groundbreaking research of documents spanning nearly 4,000 years and much of Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
In 1986, 17 years after Neuge-bauer's professional retirement, David Pingree assumed his current position as department chair. Since then, the department has awarded five Ph.D.s, with two graduate students currently working on dissertations. For the last 19 years, Pingree has been the sole full professor of the department. It has hosted several visiting professors and scholars over the years, including Slotsky.
"I dropped everything and came, and I'm thrilled to work in such a unique place," she said. Working alongside Pingree was a major factor in her decision as well: "He is the field."
As a college student, Pingree majored in classics and Sanskrit, looking especially into southern Asia and the Mediterranean world. He came across Byzantine scripts translated from Arabic which referred to Indian texts on astronomy. Despite tremendous amounts of material on the subject, he "soon found no one had done work on it."
Neugebauer's work at Brown on similar topics attracted Pingree. Pingree, now in his 80s, is still interested in "understanding how people communicated and influenced each other," through the medium of mathematical texts.
"For many years we've been primarily interested in mathematical astronomy simply because one of our interests has always been to look at the transmission of science from one culture to another and how the recipient culture alters the information," Pingree said.
One of a kind
Brown's history of mathematics department is the only one in the world, set apart from history of science departments at other universities in both its content and approach. Slotsky mentioned that the departments of history of medicine and science at Yale and history of science at Harvard focus mainly on modern science, not the historical aspects. In contrast to the programs at other schools, Brown's department takes a global approach, studying material from Mesopotamia, classical and Medieval Greek and Latin, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. It is also one of the few places for the study of the ancient history of science.
"There are lots of history of science departments, though they are becoming more and more interested in Western and American science mainly because teachers and students are not eager to learn a lot of languages," Pingree said. "American and European universities pay attention to Western tradition. They don't pay attention to anything else. ... None of them are as interested in looking cross-culturally" as Brown's history of mathematics department.
The department's unique resources make it attractive to scholars from many countries, including Denmark, England, Japan and Italy.
"There is nowhere else they can go to get this kind of material," Pingree said. His personal collection of 25,000 texts provides students with an incredible opportunity for research.
"For me, it was absolutely the best place in the world to go for what I wanted to study and work with, namely transmission of knowledge between cultures and how this knowledge is modified by the recipient culture," said Toke Knudsen, a graduate student from Denmark in his fourth year at Brown. "The program offered me a chance to get my hands on primary sources and develop skills in ancient languages and working with old manuscripts. The collection of material collected by Professor Pingree, consisting of books and copies of manuscripts, is among the best in the world and an extremely valuable resource to students and visiting scholars."
While shelves of books and stacks of manuscripts fill rooms in Wilbour Hall, they represent only a tiny fraction of the available material.
Of the millions of mathematically scientific documents in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, "Most have never been looked at. We don't even know what the titles are," Pingree said. "This whole field is so immense, and the number of people that it trains and can deal with it is so ludicrously small."
But in anticipation of Pingree's retirement, the department stopped accepting applications for graduate students a few years ago, Pingree said. The two current grad students will be able to finish their studies independently with Pingree after he retires. However, the future of the courses within the department has yet to be determined. In Pingree's opinion, "that's for the administrators to dream up."
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