Historians of mathematics have increasingly appreciated the role of written practice and bodily perception in producing mathematical research. In treating the relationship between thought and symbolic formalisms, for instance, they now avoid reproducing notions of universal and disembodied cognition. Yet little attention has been paid to how notions of disembodied cognition came to be in the first place. This talk examines how historians of mathematics negotiated conceptualizations of race in their studies of symbolic formalisms and their imagined relation to cognition. In particular, I focus on the efforts by David Eugene Smith and Yoshio Mikami to produce a history of Chinese and Japanese mathematics for an American readership in the early twentieth century. Analyzing their efforts to translate and categorize mathematics of the “Orient,” I show how Smith and Mikami’s assertions of equating “Oriental” mathematics with the formalized axiomatic approach of the early 1900s depended upon treating mathematicians monolithically, without regard to changes and differences of racial ideology.
