Nathan Reingold

Refugee mathematicians in the United States of America, 1933–1941: Reception and reaction

Summary The coming of mathematicians to the United States fleeing the spread of Nazism presented a serious problem to the American mathematical community. The persistence of the Depression had endangered the promising growth of mathematics in the United States. Leading mathematicians were concerned about the career prospects of their students. They (and others) feared that placing large numbers of refugees would exacerbate already present nationalistic and anti-Semitic sentiments. The paper surveys a sequence of events in which the leading mathematicians reacted to the foreign-born and to the spread of Nazism, culminating in the decisions by the American Mathematical Society to found the journal Mathematical reviews and to form a War Preparedness Committee in September 1939. The most obvious consequence of the migration was an enlarged role for applied mathematics.

Through Paradigm-Land to a Normal History of Science

The doctrines of T. S. Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, rev. edn 1970) have had considerable influence in a wide variety of fields. Although derived from the history of science and purporting to present a theory of how the sciences developed in time, history of science itself has remained largely immune to the Kuhnian paradigm. Not only have historians of science found few, if any, confirming instances, but the overall trend among English-speaking historians of science is to another intellectual stance, one largely indifferent to the spirit and many of the specifics of Kuhns viewpoint. The origins and characteristics of this emerging consensus are briefly sketched.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Meets the Atom Bomb

Late in 1945 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the premier Hollywood motion picture studio, decided to produce a film, on the building of the Atom Bomb. The result, The Beginning or the End, was released in the spring of 1947. To depict living, well-known individuals, MGM had to get their permission, resulting in written and oral interchanges. What follows is based largely on materials in the correspondence of J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II; Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which administered the wartime research and development effort including the atom bomb program in its early crucial stages; Leslie R. Groves, a general in the Army Corps of Engineers who headed the Manhattan Project which took over from Bush; and Albert Einstein, whose letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 started the effort (1). The correspondence makes possible a comparison of the original screenplay with various suggested revisions and with the final version as seen by the public. I hope to illuminate the differing viewpoints of the individuals involved in the development of the movie. The process depicted contains clues on issues important for historians and sociologists, as well as those in the mass media. Every genre of exposition — the scientific journal article, the historical monograph, the newspaper article, the novel, the popular motion picture, etc. — imposes a structure and a dynamic on their subject matters.

History of Science Today, 1. Uniformity as Hidden Diversity: History of Science in the United States, 1920–1940

Between the two World Wars an extensive body of writings appeared in the United States explicitly or implicitly on the historical development of the sciences. I am not referring to the vast literature of popularization in magazines and newspapers but to substantial works, often in book form, coming from various intellectual and scholarly traditions. Only a few examples are classifiable by later standards as professional history of science. Following Arnold Thackray, one can designate some authors as ‘proto-historians’ of science. Most of the writings, including those of the ‘proto-historians,’ have distinctive attributes: methods, attitudes and goals, reflecting traditions other than professional history of science or even the general history exemplified by the American Historical Associations membership of that era. What follows is a birds eye view of a past of interest for its own sake and for clues about the professionalization of history of science after 1950.

The scientist as troubled American.

The topic for this years symposium was stimulated by frank discussion and suggestions made at the 1975 LASL Life Sciences Symposium entitled The Impact of Energy Production on Human Health - An Evaluation of Means for Assessment. This symposium brings together some of the producers, transmitters, and users of scientific information related to health hazards of energy source. The symposium fostered an exchange of views on current needs and problems in the generation, interpretation, and transmission of results of health hazards research and in the utilization of these results in social decision-making processes. The primary beneficiaries are bench scientists and scientific administrators who are trying to design research to satisfy best societal requirements that are often ill-defined and conflicting.

A Miller's Tale

Following the completion of the transcription and collation processes described earlier in this CD-ROM, a NEXUS file containing a complete record of all agreements and disagreements among the 58 witnesses was generated from the parallel-segmentation collation apparatus. The NEXUS file format is widely used by evolutionary biologists to hold data concerning agreements and disagreements among populations of objects (‘taxa’ in evolutionary biology; ‘witnesses’ to us) at precise points (‘characters’ in their teams, variants in ours). The fundamental element in a NEXUS file is a data matrix, in which the agreements and disagreements at each place of variation (‘character’) among the objects surveyed are registered as entries in a series of columns and rows. This example shows the variants on the word ‘thus’ in line of Link 1, in NEXUS file data matrix format:

Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex

From the Publisher: Written for the general reader, Burkes volume provides the first view of the relationships among Americas librarians, cryptanalysts and educators as they created information science, computerized codebreaking, and the modern research university. Using hundreds of primary and secret documents and more than twenty illustrations to trace the careers of Vannevar Bush of MIT and the navys codebreaking agency, OP-20-G, Burke shows how the lack of coherent American science and intelligence policies led to the tangled lives of two proto-computers that were the worlds first electronic data-processing machines. The histories of Bushs Memex-like microfilm Rapid Selector for the American Documentalists and his Comparator for those who created the nations Ultra Bombe and RAM machines began in the early 1930s and suffered through a generation of struggles with intransigent technologies, policy conflicts with the British over the control of signals-intelligence and the unwillingness of America to develop information and intelligence technologies until the Cold War turned to science and the library to fulfill defense needs. Now, as the United States is on the verge of investing billions of dollars in information highways while reducing its intelligence capabilities, the tragedy of Bushs machines warns against information scientists putting technology ahead of logic and of the dangers of the nation returning to isolationism. Indexed and with extensive endnotes which serve the bibliographic function. Author Biography: Colin Burke (Ph.D., Washington University) is an historian and educator who has written on American social history, the history of higher education, quantitative methodsand the history of computers. He has received awards from, among others, the SSRC and the Spencer Foundation. He was the senior Fulbright scholar in Poland during the fall of Communism and has acted as a consultant to government agencies.

The Development of American Pharmacology: John J. Abel and the Shaping of a Discipline

From materia medica to pharmacology the education of a medical scientists Abel and the beginnings of pharmacology in American medical schools the growth of academic pharmacology in the United States pharmacologists in Government and industry the professionalization of a discipline.

Chemistry in America, 1876-1976: Historical Indicators

1. Orientations.- 1.1. American Chemistry in Cultural Context.- 1.2. Indicators of Trends in American Chemistry.- 1.3. Indicators and History.- 1.4. The Structure of This Study.- 2. Chemistry as Occupation and Profession.- 2.1. Chemistry as Occupation.- 2.1.1. The Differentiation of Occupations.- 2.1.2. The Problems of Measurement.- 2.1.3. Indicators of the Occupation.- 2.2. Chemistry as Profession.- 2.2.1. The American Chemical Society.- 2.2.2. The Professionalization of Chemistry.- 2.2.3. Chemistry among the Professions.- 3. Chemical Education as Context.- 3.1. Higher Education.- 3.1.1. Exponential Growth and Relative Decline.- 3.1.2. Decoupling: Vocation and Culture.- 3.2. Secondary Education.- 3.3. Mass Culture.- 4. Chemical Industry as Context.- 4.1. Diversities and Definitions.- 4.2. Chemicals and Allied Products.- 4.3. Oligopoly and Patents.- 4.4. Industry, Progress, and Boosterism.- 5. A Second Look at Employment.- 5.1. Industry.- 5.1.1. Chemists in Industry.- 5.1.2. Research Laboratories and Research Workers.- 5.2. Government.- 5.2.1. The Federal Government.- 5.2.2. Contexts of Federal Employment.- 5.2.3. State and Local Government.- 5.3. Academe.- 5.4. Other Contexts.- 6. Chemistry as Discipline.- 6.1. The Chemical Discipline and the Research University.- 6.2. Papers, Prizes, and International Prestige.- 6.2.1. Citations of American Research.- 6.2.2. Nobel Prizes.- 6.3. The Entrenchment of Chemistry.- 6.4. The Differentiation of Chemistry.- 6.4.1. Chemical Journals.- 6.4.2. Specialization and ACS Strategy.- 6.4.3. Specialty Structure.- 6.5. ACS Presidents: Some Micro-Indicators.- 6.5.1. Age Structure.- 6.5.2. Educational Background.- 6.5.3. Institutional Loci and Employment.- 6.5.4. Social Ties.- 6.6. Concluding Remarks.- Appendixes.- A. Chemistry and Chemists: Alternative Definitions.- B. Chemical Industry: Alternative Definitions.- C. Procedures Used in Analysis of Citations.- D. A Note on the Treatment of Errors.- E. Trend Analyses: Technical Details.- Tables.- An Introductory Note.- I. Data Sources.- A. Federal Government.- B. Other.- II. Bibliography, Historiography, and Methodology.- III. Other Books and Articles.

DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy

From the time the public learned of DDTs dramatic containment of a typhus epidemic in Naples during World War II to the ban on DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972, this is the story of the controversial pesticide and its part in the rise of the environmental movement.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.