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Short abstract:

Over the course of past 50 years, mathematicians’ increasing use of co-authorship has changed the evaluative rituals through which resources and prestige was being allocated to individual mathematicians. This paper explores actual math co-authorship practices versus evaluative regimes.

Long abstract:

In the early 1970s, almost 95% of all pure math papers were single-authored, by 2010, only 30% of math papers were. Co-authoring has changed how math papers are written over the course of the past fifty years in some patterned ways, most notably offering new forms of divisions of labor, and accompanying labors of division of roles, to the task of writing a math paper. This has, as a consequence, produced a proliferation of role-fractions that can accompany mathematical co-authorship. It has been happening at the same time as changes in NSF and other grant funding bodies evaluation regimes were occurring, creating evaluative practices in grant funding that greatly influenced mathematical careers. Yet all of the changes happening in math co-authorship were made relatively, but not entirely, invisible to interdisciplinary evaluation committees – that is, the academic committees in which the norms of a discipline are often topics of required explication, and can not be presumed to be shared. Why so invisible? Mathematicians practice formal declarations of authorship that conceal, for bureaucratic purposes, the social complexities of the actual authorship practices. In part because mathematicians list their authors alphabetically, and there is a strong norm that no one ever publicly discusses who did what on a co-authored paper. Despite any lived evidence to the contrary, all co-authors of a math paper are taken to have contributed equally significant labor to the text. This paper explores the consequences of the tension between formal authorship and actual practice in theoretical mathematics.