Dr Christopher Hollings
Meeting under the integral sign? The Oslo Congress of Mathematicians on the Eve of the Second World War (with Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze), American Mathematical Society, 2019, https://bookstore.ams.org/
Oral communication, and congresses in particular, remain a crucial element within mathematical communication – even in the current age of electronic mail. Indeed, congresses and meetings serve many more purposes than simply communicating information about recent mathematical research, and this has always been the case, with each particular historical period setting different priorities. This book focuses upon and stresses the historically unique character of the Oslo congress of 1936. This congress was the only one on this level to be held during the period of the Nazi regime in Germany (1933–1945) and after the wave of emigrations from it. Relying heavily on unpublished archival sources, we consider the differences between the goals of the various participants in the congress, most particularly the Norwegian organisers, and the Nazi-led German delegation. We consider also the background to the absence of the proposed Soviet and Italian delegations. In addition, we go into the mathematical dimension of the Oslo congress. This was the conference at which the Fields Medals were awarded for the first time, and we put the laudatory addresses given on this occasion into perspective. We give overviews of the 19 plenary presentations and their planning and development, and add biographical information about each of the plenary speakers. We also put the state of international mathematical communication beyond narrow political conditions into perspective; the Oslo congress is used as a lens through which to view the state of the art of mathematics in the mid-1930s.