Abstract Summary
In the early 1960s, a semiautonomous Division of Computer Science existed within Stanford University’s Department of Mathematics. While the division had initially grown out of interest in numerical analysis within the mathematics department, members of the computer science division became increasingly frustrated with the limits their relationship with mathematics placed on their growth and their ability to direct the future directions of computer science at Stanford. The computer science faculty was interested in branching out from its early emphasis on numerical analysis, but the division’s position within the mathematics department complicated efforts to include contested or less “mathematical” subfields such as artificial intelligence. I will argue that the mathematicians and computer scientists used different notions of what was mathematical and what made a good mathematician to pursue certain desired relationships between mathematics and computer science at Stanford. While the historical scholarship addressing the relationship between mathematics and computing or computer science has largely focused on specific subdisciplines or on public conversations and widespread discourses (Dick, Ensmenger, MacKenzie, Mahoney), this paper expands on this literature by examining how the institutionalized relationship between mathematics and computer science within the university context mattered to the early development of computer science as an autonomous discipline. In doing so, it contributes to the history of mathematics, the history of computing, and the history of the disciplines.
