Humanities Job Talk

A history of how logic became a mathematical science in Europe and North America in the decades around 1900. I foreground the role of writing as a technology, showing how notational techniques shaped the discipline logic became. Each new notation entailed a way of interacting with marks on paper, a manner of training students, and a vision for why people might need a science of logic. This diversity of writing practices gave logic an impulse toward reflexivity. Logic became an intellectual and institutional framework not just for using symbolic systems but for studying them as scientific objects. I trace these paper-based tools to the dawn of digital computing, asking how techniques from logic influenced the design and use of early computers.