David Waszek

  • Researcher, École Normale Supérieure

I am a historian and philosopher of mathematics. I am currently a (fixed-term) researcher at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), within the ITEM research group, in a research project on Nicolas Bourbaki. I studied mathematics and philosophy; I got a PhD in the history and philosophy of mathematics from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, then did post-docs at McGill University (Montreal) and at the CNRS (Archives Henri-Poincaré, Nancy). In Fall 2023, I was a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science of the university of Pittsburgh.

Research

Broadly speaking, I am interested in the way mathematics is expressed: the notations or diagrams one uses, the definitions one chooses, the way one structures papers or books, etc. Why do these matter? In particular, how are these related to epistemic values like intelligibility, explanatoriness, and so on? I approach these questions from a variety of angles, historical as well as philosophical. On the historical side, I have studied 17th- and 18th-century analysis as well as the history of mathematical logic in the 19th century; I am currently working on 19th-century enumerative geometry and on Nicolas Bourbaki’s books on topology.

Publications

  1. Boole’s Late Manuscript ‘On the Nature of Thought’: A Rewriting of the Laws of Thought Without Uninterpretables. History and Philosophy of Logic, 2025. (doi, AAM)
  2. Un « ouvrage accompli de la statuaire grecque ». Positionnement, forme et contenu dans la genèse d’un mémoire mathématique de G.-H. Halphen (with Nicolas Michel). Genesis 60: Sciences exactes au brouillon, 85–101, 2025. (doi)
  3. Le fonds George-Henri Halphen à la bibliothèque de l’Institut de France (with Nicolas Michel). Genesis 60: Sciences exactes au brouillon, 103–112, 2025. (doi)
  4. Signs as a Theme in the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice. B. Sriraman (ed.), Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, Springer, 2023. (AAM, doi)
  5. Informational equivalence but computational differences? Herbert Simon on representations in scientific practice, Minds and Machines, 34(1 supp.):93–116, 2024. (shareLink, AAM, doi)
  6. John Venn’s Pluralism Regarding Logical Forms (with Dirk Schlimm). E. Ficara, J. Franke-Reddig, A.-S. Heinemann, and A. Reichenberger (eds.), Rethinking the History of Logic, Mathematics, and Exact Sciences. Festschrift for Volker Peckhaus. Vol. 2, 407–447, College publications, 2025. (AAM)
  7. Are Larger Studies Always Better? Sample Size and Data Pooling Effects in Research Communities (with Cyrille Imbert). Conference paper, PSA 2022.
  8. Are Euclid’s Diagrams ‘Representations’? On an argument by Ken Manders. M. Zack and D. Schlimm (eds.), Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics. The CSHPM 2019-2020 Volume, Birkhäuser, 2022. (shareLink, doi, AAM)
  9. Calculus as Method or Calculus as Rules? Boole and Frege on the aims of a logical calculus (with Dirk Schlimm). Synthese, 199(5–6):11913–11943, 2021. (shareLink, doi)
  10. Multiple Readability in Principle and Practice (with Dirk Schlimm). Logique et analyse 251:231–260, 2020. (AAM, doi)
  11. Le rôle des notations dans la découverte de l’analogie des puissances et des différences de Leibniz. Almagest 14(2):256–266, 2023. Conference paper from 2017. (doi)
  12. Rigor and the Context-Dependence of Diagrams: The Case of Euler Diagrams. P. Chapman, G. Stapleton, A. Moktefi, S. Perez-Kriz and F. Bellucci (eds.), Diagrammatic Representation and Inference, Springer, 2018, 382–389.

Reviews and others

  1. Review of New Light on George Boole, by D. MacHale and Y. Cohen. Historia Mathematica 51:91–93, 2020. (doi)
  2. A conversation with Sun-Joo Shin. APhEx 17, 2018.

PhD thesis

  1. Les représentations en mathématiques. PhD thesis. (Some typos corrected, Jan. 2019.)

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Editorial work

Since 2021, I have been co-editor of the Annals of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics. We edit a yearly collection of papers, published by Birkhäuser.

2021 volume   ·   2022 volume   ·   2023 volume   ·   2024 volume (in press)

Expository material

Some old expository material, on the off-chance it may be of use:
RCA₀ et l’analyse calculable. A short note on the relation between RCA₀ and computable analysis (2013).
Opérades et complexes de graphe. On graph complexes, following Kontsevich (Master’s thesis, 2012).
Cochains. On rational homotopy theory, following Quillen and Sullivan (Cambridge Part III essay, 2011).
Calculabilité en analyse. Quadrature 72:36–40, 2009.