A Crisis in Modern Physics and its Roots in Post-Revolutionary Paris

In the early 1900s, physicists led by Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr increasingly abandoned mechanical models and visualization, while at the same time exhibiting considerable trust in the mechanical manipulation of algebraic signs. This approach to physics had roots in developments in math education in the early 1800s, at the elite national and imperial school for military engineers, the École Polytechnique in Paris. I will trace how mathematicians' abandonment of meaning in post-revolutionary Paris facilitated a later "crisis of understanding" in modern physics.