The Politics of Representation: Narratives of Automation in Twentieth-Century American Mathematics
Stephanie Dick · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022
This chapter explores narratives that informed two influential attempts to automate and consolidate mathematics in large computing systems during the second half of the twentieth century – the QED system and the MACSYMA system. These narratives were both political (aligning the automation of mathematics with certain cultural values) and epistemic (each laid out a vision of what mathematics entailed such that it could and should be automated). These narratives united political and epistemic considerations especially with regards to representation : how will mathematical objects and procedures be translated into computer languages and operations and encoded in memory? How much freedom or conformity will be required of those who use and build these systems? MACSYMA and QED represented opposite approaches to these questions: preserving pluralism with a heterogeneous modular design vs requiring that all mathematics be translated into one shared root logic. The narratives explored here shaped, explained and justified the representational choices made in each system and aligned them with specific political and epistemic projects.