Welcome to my personal webpage. Below, you can find my contact information; present, past, and non-academic affiliations; and current, completed (or shelved), and "non-scholarly" research projects. You can find a web version of my CV, with links to my articles, preprints, and some working papers at this link.
The best way to reach me is by email at mbarany(at)princeton.edu.
I am a PhD student in the Program in History of Science at Princeton University. I hold a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship which supports research and study in both mathematics and its history.
I hold an A.B. (2008) from Cornell University in Mathematics and the History, Sociology, and Philosophy thereof (these latter were through the College Scholar Program). From 2008 to 2010, I migrated to the United Kingdom under a Marshall Scholarship to pursue an MPhil (2009) in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine at St. John's College, Cambridge and an MSc by research (2010) in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. I attended the University of Minnesota more or less continuously in one form or another from my infancy until leaving for Cornell. My father is a professor of Chemistry at Minnesota, and my mother currently teaches high school chemistry in the St. Paul Public Schools. I first identified as a future historian and a mathematician (among many other things) at Parkview Center School in the Roseville Area School District.
My planned dissertation research at Princeton, still in a very preliminary stage, concerns the early development and adoption of Laurent Schwartz's theory of distributions in the mid-twentieth century.
I have an ongoing interest in the Early Modern reception of Euclid's Elements. I am in the middle of a short-term study of diagrams and elementary definitions in the first English translations (from 1551-1571), and I am at the start of a longer term study (in collaboration with Gregg De Young) on transformations in Euclidean diagrams surrounding the advent of printed geometry (circa 1482-1530).
Starting with my MSc work at Edinburgh, I have been studying the sociology of mathematical research and collaboration, including an ethnography of researchers in mathematical analysis (in collaboration with Donald MacKenzie) and a study of the "Polymath" series of large-scale online mathematical collaborations. I am also exploring the meanings and manifestations of mathematical objects, including what I call slightly scalene examples in mathematical demonstrations, and the relationships between those objects, mathematical proofs, and various theories of translation and narrative.
I am in the process of revising and extending my MPhil dissertation work from Cambridge, which explored the nineteenth century origins of more recent views in Anglo-American histories of mathematics on the emergence of counting and numbers among humans, circa 1850 to 1900.
I contributed to a recently released translation (from French to English) of volume one of Roshdi Rashed's Mathematiques Infinitesimales.
While at Cambridge, I completed a short study of a small basalt scale from the Whipple Museum of the History of Science that was used by Scotland's Astronomer Royal Charles Piazzi Smyth to measure the Great Pyramid at Giza in 1865.
My undergraduate thesis contained an analysis of the social, epistemological, and mathematical rhetoric of the introduction to Cauchy's 1821 Cours d'Analyse. Several years and many revisions later, the analysis developed into a nice publication.
In 2006, I participated in an REU directed by Bob Strichartz on the topic of differential equations on fractals. He and Luke Rogers directed my study of energy forms on higher-dimensional analogues of the Sierpinski Gasket, some results of which are discussed here. Luke and I continued the project and believe we have the makings of an existence result, but writing up the details has been on hold since our respective departures from Cornell.
In 2005, I worked with Vic Reiner at the University of Minnesota to write a C program to compute Tutte polynomials for hyperplane arrangements. We used the program to develop a generating function for Tutte polynomials for matroids derived from a family of finite projective spaces (pdf, ps). The program source code and documentation, which I'm told have been used successfully by people other than Vic and myself, can be found at this link.
While in high school, I worked in my father's lab on a handful of projects relating to the organic chemistry of sulfur compounds.
Site created July, 2010, and updated July, 2011. Please ask my permission before reproducing or distributing materials hosted on this webpage.