How did colonized scientists forge international connections in their sphere of work? What were the implications of these connections for the development of the science in the nation and the discipline as a global phenomenon? Focusing on Indian statisticians in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, I analyze their attempts towards international network building. Colonized Indian statisticians sought legitimacy from their Euro-American collaborators while also claiming recognition as equal peers in the development of modern science. This period also witnessed the rise of scientific internationalism, and there were attempts from Euro-America to collaborate with postcolonial scientists to advance science, achieve international peace and combat fascism. I analyse the minutiae of the practices of collaborations between Indian and European scientists to highlight the unevenness and its imbrications with imperialism and postcolonialism. At the same time, the turn to internationalising science impacted the kind of national issues taken up by Indian statisticians and the ones they marginalized. While racial origin, national economy and territorial distribution between religious demographies became acceptable subjects of statistical intervention, social hierarchies and discriminatory practices were considered peripheral as issues subjectable to scientific redressal. The statisticians suggested that such irrationality and biases would automatically dissolve once the public became scientific and rational. What does this varied prioritizing of problems solvable through scientific internationalism tell us about the Indian statisticians’ understanding of progress and peace? I show how internationalization of science remained imbricated with the maintenance of elite nationalism and social exclusions within the postcolonial nation.

In the 1820s and 1830s, the Paris Académie des Sciences played a particularly important role for mathematics in France, both in terms of its assessment of the research submitted to it and of the scientific standing of its members. Through its transactions and memoirs, but also through the presence of journalists who reported what was said during the meetings in the daily press, the Académie was a veritable echo chamber for the books that were sent there, the works that were read there and those that were evaluated there. Since the Académie's dominance was not without internal tensions and external challenges, these newspapers also reported debates and disagreements that were ignored by the official academic publications, and provided a forum for actors who were excluded from the scientific scene. In this talk we will use a case study - a debate between the academicians Poinsot and Poisson in the mid-1830s - to explore the effects of the existence of this media space alongside the academic space on mathematical exchange and the production of results.

Scottish polymath Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was widely celebrated in her lifetime as an expert in physical astronomy and as a writer of reflective scientific treatises. Yet, owing to the predominant exclusion of women from memberships of learned societies in her lifetime, it took nearly two decades before Somerville was elected a member to any such society. Moreover, even when she was recognised, it was usually only with honorary membership rather than being elected on equal footing with her male contemporaries. Whilst Somerville's elections are often noted as a step towards greater inclusion for women in science, in fact they made little practical difference to her research methods or access to scientific communities (indeed, less than ten years after her election as an honorary fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, she claimed to have forgotten that this ever took place!).

In this talk, I will explore the ways in which Somerville gained access to the libraries, collections, and networks of 19th-century scientific institutions, without pursuing formal membership. I will especially focus on how she used this access to support her mathematical research, comparing her experiences in London during the 1820s and her return to mathematics in the 1860s whilst living in Naples.