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Title
Andrea Bréard appointed Humboldt Professor at FAU
Date:
Date:
27 November 2020
Prof. Andrea Bréard, science historian and former member at the HCTS, is among the eight professors appointed for the 2021
Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. She is also among the three women scientists to be awarded the prize. The
2021 award winners were selected from a pool of nineteen nominated researchers from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the USA, and the United Kingdom. Dr. Bréard was nominated by the
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), where she has been also offered the directorship of the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities “Fate, Freedom and Prognostication. Strategies for Coping with the Future in East Asia and Europe.”
With a value of five million euros, the
Alexander von Humboldt Professorship is the highest-endowed research award in Germany. It is awarded to world-leading researchers from abroad and enables them to conduct long-term research at German universities. The prize money is intended for their first five years of research in Germany. The award is granted by the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and financed by the
Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The press release about the 2021 new appointments is available
here.
From 2013 to 2016, Bréard was a member of the HCTS Interdisciplinary Research Group “
Standards of Validity in Imperial Chinese Discourses,” coordinated by
Prof. Joachim Kurtz and
Dr. Martin Hofmann (Intellectual History). The aim of the subproject was to disclose the implicit criteria governing truth-claims in Chinese dialogical reasoning. Bréard´s research focus was on the practices of argumentation in late Imperial Chinese mathematical writings, in particular inductive and analogical reasoning in number theoretical discourse. For the project-related volume “
Powerful Arguments: Standards of Validity in Late Imperial China,” she contributed the essay “
Inductive Arguments in the Midst of Smoke: “Proving” Rhetorically and Visually That Algorithms Work.”
Although Bréard´s main expertise lies in the history of Chinese mathematics, her work extends far beyond the boundaries of the discipline to shed light on the development of the intellectual history of China at large. Her latest publication, titled “
Nine Chapters on Mathematical Modernity,” addresses the dynamics associated with the modernization of the mathematical science in China between the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century from a transcultural, global-historical perspective. The book, based on a vast array of translated primary sources, illustrates how Chinese scholars mediated between new mathematical objects and discursive modes, and how they instrumentalised their autochthonous scientific roots in specific political and intellectual contexts.
Prof. Dr. Dr.
Andrea Bréard is professor of history of science at the
University of Paris-Saclay (France). She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Technical University of Berlin and a PhD in Epistemology and the History of Science from Paris Diderot University. She has taught mathematics, history of science, and sinology at the technical universities of Munich and Lille, at the École Polytechnique, and the universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt. Her main research fields are the history of mathematics, modern China, and the combinatorial practices of games and divination in pre-modern China.
Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. She is also among the three women scientists to be awarded the prize. The
2021 award winners were selected from a pool of nineteen nominated researchers from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the USA, and the United Kingdom. Dr. Bréard was nominated by the
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), where she has been also offered the directorship of the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities “Fate, Freedom and Prognostication. Strategies for Coping with the Future in East Asia and Europe.”
With a value of five million euros, the
Alexander von Humboldt Professorship is the highest-endowed research award in Germany. It is awarded to world-leading researchers from abroad and enables them to conduct long-term research at German universities. The prize money is intended for their first five years of research in Germany. The award is granted by the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and financed by the
Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The press release about the 2021 new appointments is available
here.
From 2013 to 2016, Bréard was a member of the HCTS Interdisciplinary Research Group “
Standards of Validity in Imperial Chinese Discourses,” coordinated by
Prof. Joachim Kurtz and
Dr. Martin Hofmann (Intellectual History). The aim of the subproject was to disclose the implicit criteria governing truth-claims in Chinese dialogical reasoning. Bréard´s research focus was on the practices of argumentation in late Imperial Chinese mathematical writings, in particular inductive and analogical reasoning in number theoretical discourse. For the project-related volume “
Powerful Arguments: Standards of Validity in Late Imperial China,” she contributed the essay “
Inductive Arguments in the Midst of Smoke: “Proving” Rhetorically and Visually That Algorithms Work.”
Although Bréard´s main expertise lies in the history of Chinese mathematics, her work extends far beyond the boundaries of the discipline to shed light on the development of the intellectual history of China at large. Her latest publication, titled “
Nine Chapters on Mathematical Modernity,” addresses the dynamics associated with the modernization of the mathematical science in China between the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century from a transcultural, global-historical perspective. The book, based on a vast array of translated primary sources, illustrates how Chinese scholars mediated between new mathematical objects and discursive modes, and how they instrumentalised their autochthonous scientific roots in specific political and intellectual contexts.
Prof. Dr. Dr.
Andrea Bréard is professor of history of science at the
University of Paris-Saclay (France). She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Technical University of Berlin and a PhD in Epistemology and the History of Science from Paris Diderot University. She has taught mathematics, history of science, and sinology at the technical universities of Munich and Lille, at the École Polytechnique, and the universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt. Her main research fields are the history of mathematics, modern China, and the combinatorial practices of games and divination in pre-modern China.