Karine Chemla is Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University Paris Diderot and University Paris Panthéon Sorbonne.
Evelyn Fox Keller is Professor Emerita of the History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Karine Chemla is Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University Paris Diderot and University Paris Panthéon Sorbonne.
Evelyn Fox Keller is Professor Emerita of the History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
E Uno Plures?: Unity and Diversity in Galois Theory, 1832–1900
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Published:March 2017
Caroline Ehrhardt, 2017. "E Uno Plures?: Unity and Diversity in Galois Theory, 1832–1900", Cultures without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge, Karine Chemla, Evelyn Fox Keller
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This chapter explores questions about the social and cultural aspects of the making and the reading of a scientific theory. What is a mathematical proof? What does it mean to understand a mathematical work? To shed light on these questions, this chapter compares Évariste Galois’s memoir and some of the various ways that it was read and used in the making of Galois theory. It shows that Galois’s successors did far more than simply fill in the gaps in Galois’s paper. Each of them made several additions and reorganized the paper. In fact, Galois’s readers constructed not one but several theories out of his work. Far from being neutral and natural operations, reading and using Galois’s work were subjective exercises conducted in particular cultural environments, where knowledge, practices, representations, epistemological values, institutions, and social configurations all influenced the final result.
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