THE MORAVIAN CROSSROAD : MATHEMATICS AND MATHEMATICIANS IN BRNO BETWEEN GERMAN TRADITIONS AND CZECH HOPES

摘要

Following the Armistice in November 1918, national borders were drastically redrawn in Europe. New states, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, emerged and immediately had to situate themselves geopolitically. To the new states, military circumstances dictated a system of alliances with the victors of World War I - mainly Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. The Allies having imposed an embargo on scientific collaboration with Germany and Austria, mathematicians in the new states were even more inclined to translate the geopolitical situation into intellectual cooperation1. For countries that had hitherto been submitted to German, Austrian, or Russian influence and authority, this led to major cultural realignments. At the local levels, the tense cohabitation between different linguistic, religious, and national communities complicated matters even more. But what effect did this political reshuffling of territories have on mathe-matics, if any ? One way to start examining this question is to look at correspon-dences that were established at that time between mathematicians in Allied nations and those who lived in the newly created states of Central Europe.