The history of applied mathematics and the history of society

Michael Stolz

pp. 43-57

in: Benedikt Lowe, Florian Rudolph (eds), Foundations of the formal sciences I, Synthese 133, 2002.

Abstract

Choosing the history of statistics and operations research as a casestudy, several ways of setting the development of 20th century appliedmathematics into a social context are discussed. It is shown that there isample common ground between these contextualizations and several recent research programs in general contemporary history. It is argued that a closer cooperation between general historians and historians ofmathematics might further the integration of the internalist andexternalist approaches within the historiography of mathematics.