Overview

Along with the establishment of international fellowships, institutes and prizes such as the Fields Medal, both the formal and the informal formation of an international community of scholars of mathematics proved a powerful shaping force to the course of twentieth-century mathematical thought and research. In essence, the rise of an international mathematics community in the early part of the twentieth century was, with particular regard to scholarly communication, analogous to the Internet revolution at the end of the century. In both cases new communications media revolutionized mathematics teaching, publishing, and institutions.

Background

During the nineteenth century mathematical methods and applications became increasingly useful to science, engineering, and economics. Mathematicians also developed mathematical logic and abstract definitions, complex relations, and theorems of pure mathematics. Although there were subtle divisions of mathematics at the beginning of the nineteenth century...