L'evoluzione della ricerca universitaria: John Hopkins, Chicago e Berkeley

The final three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed dramatic changes in higher education in the United States. Following the close of the American Civil War, not only were vast fortunes directed to the endowment of new, research-oriented universities like The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago, but also Federal support for higher education in the form of so-called land grants to the individual states spurred the formation of new institutions with an ostensibly practical bent like the University of California at Berkeley. Hopkins and Chicago in the late nineteenth century, followed by Berkeley in the interwar years of the twentieth century, built first-rate Departments of Mathematics that fostered the active production of research as well as the training of future researchers. In so doing, they served as the models for older, more established institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and helped lay the groundwork for the establishment of a mathematical profession in the twentieth century.