Marshall stone and the internationalization of the American mathematical research community

Abstract

The American mathematical research community celebrated, symbolically at least, its fiftieth anniversary in 1938. Many of those fifty years had marked a period of consolidation and growth at home of programs in mathematics at institutions of higher education supportive of high-level research as well as of a corps of talented researchers capable of making seminal contributions in a variety of mathematical areas. By the middle decades of the twentieth century-the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s-members of that community, like members of the broader American public, began increasingly to look outward beyond the national boundaries of the United States and toward a larger international arena. This paper explores the contexts within which the American mathematical research community, in general, and the American mathematician Marshall Stone, in particular, deliberately worked in the decades around mid-century to effect the transformation from a national community to one actively participating in an internationalizing mathematical world. © 2009 American Mathematical Society.