This article positions the vogue for cybernetics as a key driver of the transformation of the institutional structures and epistemic order of Soviet technoscience that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Inseparable from the rapid growth of Soviet military science, Soviet cybernetics was both the result and medium of surprising recombinations of different forms of scientific and engineering expertise to create novel military technologies. Military computing was the point of entry for cybernetics, while its focal tasks—the bomb, rocketry, and radar—in turn shaped cybernetic understandings. The rapid growth and cyberneticization of these new areas of militarily driven science caused a tectonic transformation of the Stalinist articulation of science, technology, and politics. A crucial moment of these latter shifts, the article further suggests, was the transformation of Soviet economics into a properly mathematical economics. In a series of analogical transfers, mathematicians and engineers derived a radical vision of cybernetic communism from their specific military engineering tasks. Their encounter with reformist economics, mediated by computational utopias, enabled the transfer of advanced mathematical techniques, metaphors, and personnel from military science to the social sciences. This complex process constituted Soviet mathematical economics. Soviet cybernetics’ challenge to the Stalinist order of knowledge and its attendant institutional reconfigurations thus opened up a critical space for political reflection for the Cold War era “scientific-technical intelligentsia” at the heart of the party-state.

The geographic reach and international integration of modern mathematics expanded dramatically in the wake of the Second World War. I examine the political and logistical achievement of intercontinental mathematics in this period by following the travels of José Luis Massera of Uruguay, Leopoldo Nachbin of Brazil, and Laurent Schwartz of France. The interlocking efforts of mathematicians and bureaucrats in universities, governments, philanthropies, and new postwar formations like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to build mathematical institutions in Latin America operated with partial information, competing prerogatives, and costly exchanges of materials and personnel, each of which reflected the shifting economic and political constraints of the global Cold War. Drawing primarily on fellowship files and institutional archives, I situate these undertakings in the mechanics and ideals of twentieth-century scientific colonialism, development, and modernization. I explain how the seemingly nontechnical bases for such exchanges related to the specific mathematics being taught and researched by accounting for the particular success of Schwartz’s theory of distributions in Latin America, which owed both to circumstantial coincidences and to a mixture of several of the theory’s superficial, technical, and conceptual features. My analysis stresses the complex, ambivalent, but nonetheless consequential personal and institutional negotiations underwriting midcentury intercontinental mathematics while pointing to the importance of such phenomena for explaining the form and effects of the period’s broader array of global scientific exchanges.