Workshop: Mathematical Notes: Materiality and Epistemology

The study of notes written in mathematical language has long been an indispensable ingredient of a wider history of the mathematical sciences. Thus, the analysis and interpretation of the notes of prominent figures such as Galileo, Newton, Hilbert and Einstein have provided us with important insights into research processes and scientific thinking. At the same time, mathematical notes and notebooks have generally not been appreciated as objects of study in their own right, namely as constituting a particular category of written artefacts. The aim of the workshop is to strengthen this perspective by bringing together studies on manuscripts and artefacts from different historical periods and cultural realms that bear mathematical notes produced in different contexts or belonging to different disciplines. We thereby encourage an approach that focuses on the interplay between the materiality of the artefact on one hand and the study of its contents on the other, thus furthering the study of mathematical notes as a category of written artefacts in their material, cognitive and social dimensions.