Freedom and Control: Making Up Minds and Machines in the Soviet Union and the US

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• Ekaterina Babintseva (Purdue University)
• Thursday 01 May 2025, 09:15-10:15
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.

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MHMW02 - Modern History of Mathematics: Looking Ahead

In the mid-twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union came to believe that the future of each country hinged on capable technoscientific workforce. To cultivate such workforce, researchers in both countries suggested replacing human instructors with special pedagogical computers to turn learning and teaching into an effective and fully controllable process.  At the same time, in the 1960s and the 1970s, both American and Soviet societies saw the rising urgency of the concept of creativity. This presentation explores how researchers in each country navigated the challenge of turning the mid-century computer, a paradigmatic command and control machine, into the technology that could cultivate creative thinking. In doing so, this talk explores the historical intersections of human sciences and computing, treating pedagogical computing as an effort in engineering human behavior and thinking.

This talk is part of the Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series series.

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