Martina Bečvářová

In the article, we will show the main important results of the international research project The impact of WWI on the formation and transformation of the scientific life of the mathematical community. It was supported by the Czech Science Foundation for the years 2018–2020 and brought together ten scientists from five countries (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, USA, and Ukraine) and used the collaboration with historians of mathematics and mathematicians from many other European countries. We will discuss our motivation for the creation of the project, our methodological and professional preparations which profited from the international composition of the team and its longtime collaborations, profound specializations and experiences of the team members, and their deep and long-term studies of many archival sources and basic published works. We will present our choice of the general research trends, our definition of the scientific questions, and our determination of the main topics of our studies. We will describe our most important results (books, articles, visiting lectures, presentations at national and international conferences, seminars and book fairs, exhibitions, popularizations of the results between students, teachers, mathematicians, historians of sciences, and people who love mathematics and its history). We will analyze the new benefit that the project created for the future, for example, good platforms for future international research and cooperation, the discovery of many new interesting research questions, problems, and plans.

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The most important and interesting phenomena from the history of the association Mathematische Kränzchen in Prag (the Prague German Mathematics Community), which operated in Prague between spring 1913 and spring 1934, will be introduced, on the basis of the study of surviving archive sources available in Czech country and abroad, original professional journals mathematical works, and diverse secondary literature. We will try to clarify the position of the German mathematical community in the Czech lands, respectively in Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. We will try to capture its specifics resulting from the Prague genius loci, to describe its contributions to the development of science, to indicate its links to the surrounding German scientific world and to show its relations with Czech and foreign professional associations and societies.

From 1860s, the number of mathematicians, teachers and authors of monographs, textbooks and papers in Bohemia increased noticeably. This was due to the improvement of education and the emergence of societies. During 1870s and 1880s many candidates for teaching mathematics and physics were without regular position and income. Some of them went abroad (especially to the Balkans) where they obtained better posts and started to play important roles in the development of “national” mathematics and mathematical education. The article describes this remarkable phenomenon from the history of the Czech mathematical community and analyzes its influence on other national communities.

In the Czech lands, there is a long and fruitful tradition of research and study of the history of mathematics which began in the second half of the 19th century. The most important papers and books were written by J. Smolík, F.J. Studnička, J. Úlehla, K. Rychlík and Q. Vetter. But from the 1950s to the 1980s only a few professionals from the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, along with a few university professors, devoted their attention to the history of mathematics. For example, we can mention two historians of mathematics, Jaroslav Folta and Luboš Nový, whose papers and activities became well-known in Europe. However, on account of various professional and political circumstances, no new generation of historians of mathematics was raised. The first step to the new development of research in the history of mathematics was made in the 1980s, when the special commission on history of mathematics was created at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague, thanks to activities of Jindřich Bečvář, Ivan Netuka and Jiří Veselý.