Archives of American Mathematics Receives Grant Funding
April 3, 2013
The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History is pleased to announce a five-year continuation of a grant for the Archives of American Mathematics. The grant is from the Educational Advancement Foundation (EAF), an Austin-based philanthropic organization. With this renewal, the AAM also embarks on a campaign to raise $2 million to endow a permanent archivist’s chair.
Since 2003, the EAF has generously supported the project’s archivist position, establishing the AAM as the only archives in the United States with an archivist dedicated to its mathematics collections. This funding has allowed the AAM to build and preserve its collections, provide reference services to researchers around the world, oversee projects to make its collections available online, and conduct outreach.
“I wish to thank the EAF for its generous continued funding, and to encourage Briscoe Center supporters with an interest in the history of mathematics to consider donating to the AAM’s endowment campaign,” said Don Carleton, executive director of the Briscoe Center. “This is a good time to capitalize on our growing reputation and to work toward a permanent archivist’s chair.”
Within the American mathematics community, the AAM has raised awareness of its resources during the last 10 years through a regular column in a mathematical newsletter and participation in major mathematical conferences.
The AAM was founded in 1975 at UT’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center with the papers of two longtime UT mathematics professors, R. L. Moore and H. S. Vandiver. In 1978, the Mathematical Association of America, one of the two biggest mathematical organizations in the United States, established the university as its records repository; the HRC transferred the AAM to the UT Libraries in 1980. In 2003, the EAF, whose focus is inquiry-based learning, also known as “The Moore Method,” for R. L. Moore’s teaching style, revived the mathematics archives with its first grant to the Briscoe Center.
