The simplest situation that can exist at a campus is that there is one mathematics department that has a continuous existence from 1905, the start of our study, to 2005. This is the state of affairs at many campuses, such as Williams College, City College of New York, etc. But at some campuses the situation is more complicated. At Morgan State University, although this institution has had a continuous existence since the middle of the 19th century, the archivist was unable to locate any catalog before 1936 (which we regard as an acceptable stand-in for 1935, the year we normally sought.) Sometimes there are two departments at a campus that meet our selection criteria1 and so both qualify as mathematics departments. For example, Stanford begins the century with two departments, an applied department and a pure department. By 1935 they have merged. We regard the merged department as a new department.
Our names for departments are not always the official name one finds in their catalogs. The main reason for this is that the official names often change for no reason that seem to have anything to do with the aims of this project. For example, in 1905 we have, at U. Texas at Austin, a unit entitled “School of Pure Mathematics”. A few decades later, it had changed to “Department of Pure Mathematics”. We needed a single name for it to avoid confusion.
We actually have three versions of the name for a department: a natural language name, an abbreviated name, and a name used for the abbreviated data workbook containing the course data for that department. For example
| Natural language | U. Wisconsin at Madison |
| Abbreviation | WiscMad |
| Workbook name | UWisconsinMadison1905To2005.xlsx |
The complete list of names can be found in columns A, C and J of the workbook ParametersToSet.xlsx in the folder
CajoriTwo_4.0\DataAnalysis\SomeUserChoicesGuidingARun.
Histories of the departments – the case of Johns Hopkins.
Each of our departments undoubtedly has an interesting and possibly quite colorful history. We would dearly love to know these histories, but we have not investigated them. However, one of them came to our attention because Johns Hopkins University included this history on its website. The department we speak of is the one which makes its first appearance in our tables in 1975 and whose name at Johns Hopkins is (in 2013) Applied Mathematics and Statistics and whose workbook we have named JHopkinsUAppAndStat1975To2005.xlsx.
The short version of the history of this department is that in 1946 Hopkins created an Industrial Engineering department. It taught very few mathematics courses. This department, at its inception, does not qualify for our survey because the name of the department did not include either the word “Mathematics” or “Mathematical”. As the years went by, more mathematics courses were added and there were name changes as well. In 1973 the name of the department finally included the word “Mathematical” so, in survey year 1975, we began including it. The longer story is quoted below from the Hopkins website.
Department History
The Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics had its origins in the fall of 1946, when an undergraduate curriculum in industrial engineering was first introduced in response to requests from returning military veterans, who constituted nearly half the entering class in the School of Engineering that semester. In 1947, Robert H. Roy was appointed Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and was asked to develop a program in Industrial Engineering. Roy's appointment led to the creation of the Department of Industrial Engineering in 1950, with an initial faculty of three members. The Department was founded with an emphasis on the abstract study of complex operational systems in people and machines, rather than the more utilitarian studies, which had characterized other engineering curricula. Accordingly, the first two years of the undergraduate program provided basic training in chemistry, physics, mathematics and the principles of accounting, while the third and fourth years concentrated on industrial organization, production methods, labor relations, business regulations, political economy and psychology. The graduate program emphasized production organization and industrial-business management.
With the demand for engineering and business graduates remaining high, the 1950s witnessed rapid growth in the Department. By the end of the decade, the number of faculty had increased to seven, with their specialties extending from industrial organization and management to statistics and accounting. The number of undergraduate majors in industrial engineering averaged twenty each year after 1954, while the number of graduate degrees rose from two in 1956 to seven in 1960.
In 1964, the Department was renamed the Department of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, reflecting the increasing importance of operations research in the Department's academic program. During the 1960s, the department grew steadily under the leadership of Robert H. Roy, who served as Chairman from 1950 until 1972. When the School of Engineering Sciences merged with the Faculty of Philosophy to form the School of Arts and Sciences in 1966, the Department became part of Arts and Sciences.
In the 1970s the Department expanded dramatically, and, with its nineteen faculty members in the late 1970s, became one of the largest departments in the University. Student enrollment, especially at the graduate level, increased substantially; by 1979, there were twenty-four Bachelor of Arts, eight Masters, and two Ph.D. degrees conferred by the Department. Roger A. Horn chaired the Department from 1973 to 1978, during this period of expansion. In 1973 the Department was renamed the Department of Mathematical Sciences and began emphasizing the use of mathematical methods to solve the problems raised by the natural sciences (astronomy, physics and chemistry), as well as the modern sciences (operations research, demography, management science, psychology, information science and computer science).
Maintaining its concentration on modern applied mathematics to the present day, the Department developed five major training and research areas: (1) probability and statistics; (2) operations research and optimization; (3) discrete mathematics; (4) matrix analysis; and (5) computational mathematics. In the 1980s, while the undergraduate program experienced a slight decrease in number of students, the graduate program continued its expansion. In 1985, twenty-three Masters and five Ph.D. degrees were conferred by the Department.
In 2004, the Department changed its name to Applied Mathematics and Statistics, reflecting its commitment to mathematics important in applications. Since Roger Horn left the chairmanship of the Department in 1979, there have been six successors: William H. Huggins, 1979-1980; Robert J. Serfling, 1981-1984 and 1986-1988; Alan F. Karr, 1985; John C. Wierman, 1988-2000; Edward R. Scheinerman, 2000-2004; and Daniel Q. Naiman, 2004-present.”
1The department must have “mathematics” or “mathematical” in its name, but not be a department of mathematics education.