Purity and disinterest as distinction: Mathematics among polytechnic engineers at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century

Crossing a series of statutes of some Brazilian polytechnic schools, mainly those of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, from the Empire to the First Republic's end, with an analysis of speeches and photographs of some engineers attached to these institutions, I argue that mathematics came under discredit during the First Republic although it constituted an important element of distinction of engineers in relation to lawyers and physicians in the Second Empire. In this context, the defense of pure and disinterested sciences was a way to face this challenge by the professors of basic areas in these schools. I also argue in this paper that the creation of mathematics and physics courses in the new universities in the 1930s, in some sense the process of professionalization of these areas, was a reaction to this process of discredit.