Download or read book Philosophy of Mathematics in Antiquity and in Modern Times written by Ulrich Felgner and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: »Philosophy of Mathematics« is understood, in this book, as an effort to clarify such questions that mathematics itself raises but cannot answer with its own methods. These include, for example, questions about the ontological status of mathematical objects (e.g., what is the nature of mathematical objects?) and the epistemological status of mathematical theorems (e.g., from what sources do we draw when we prove mathematical theorems?). The answers given by Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, Cantor, Frege, Dedekind, Hilbert and others will be studied in detail. This will lead us to deep insights, not only into the history of mathematics, but also into the conception of mathematics as it is commonly held in the present time. The book is a translation from the German, however revised and considerably expanded. Various chapters have been completely rewritten.

Download or read book Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times Volume 1 written by Morris Kline and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990-08-16 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development of mathematics from its beginnings in Babylonia and ancient Egypt to the work of Riemann and Godel in modern times.

Download or read book Uncountable written by David Nirenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-05-09 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from math to literature to philosophy, Uncountable explains how numbers triumphed as the basis of knowledge—and compromise our sense of humanity. Our knowledge of mathematics has structured much of what we think we know about ourselves as individuals and communities, shaping our psychologies, sociologies, and economies. In pursuit of a more predictable and more controllable cosmos, we have extended mathematical insights and methods to more and more aspects of the world. Today those powers are greater than ever, as computation is applied to virtually every aspect of human activity. Yet, in the process, are we losing sight of the human? When we apply mathematics so broadly, what do we gain and what do we lose, and at what risk to humanity? These are the questions that David and Ricardo L. Nirenberg ask in Uncountable, a provocative account of how numerical relations became the cornerstone of human claims to knowledge, truth, and certainty. There is a limit to these number-based claims, they argue, which they set out to explore. The Nirenbergs, father and son, bring together their backgrounds in math, history, literature, religion, and philosophy, interweaving scientific experiments with readings of poems, setting crises in mathematics alongside world wars, and putting medieval Muslim and Buddhist philosophers in conversation with Einstein, Schrödinger, and other giants of modern physics. The result is a powerful lesson in what counts as knowledge and its deepest implications for how we live our lives.

Download or read book The History of Continua written by Stewart Shapiro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematical and philosophical thought about continuity has changed considerably over the ages. Aristotle insisted that continuous substances are not composed of points, and that they can only be divided into parts potentially. There is something viscous about the continuous. It is a unified whole. This is in stark contrast with the prevailing contemporary account, which takes a continuum to be composed of an uncountably infinite set of points. This vlume presents a collective study of key ideas and debates within this history. The opening chapters focus on the ancient world, covering the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander. The treatment of the medieval period focuses on a (relatively) recently discovered manuscript, by Bradwardine, and its relation to medieval views before, during, and after Bradwardine's time. In the so-called early modern period, mathematicians developed the calculus and, with that, the rise of infinitesimal techniques, thus transforming the notion of continuity. The main figures treated here include Galileo, Cavalieri, Leibniz, and Kant. In the early party of the nineteenth century, Bolzano was one of the first important mathematicians and philosophers to insist that continua are composed of points, and he made a heroic attempt to come to grips with the underlying issues concerning the infinite. The two figures most responsible for the contemporary orthodoxy regarding continuity are Cantor and Dedekind. Each is treated in an article, investigating their precursors and influences in both mathematics and philosophy. A new chapter then provides a lucid analysis of the work of the mathematician Paul Du Bois-Reymond, to argue for a constructive account of continuity, in opposition to the dominant Dedekind-Cantor account. This leads to consideration of the contributions of Weyl, Brouwer, and Peirce, who once dubbed the notion of continuity "the master-key which . . . unlocks the arcana of philosophy". And we see that later in the twentieth century Whitehead presented a point-free, or gunky, account of continuity, showing how to recover points as a kind of "extensive abstraction". The final four chapters each focus on a more or less contemporary take on continuity that is outside the Dedekind-Cantor hegemony: a predicative approach, accounts that do not take continua to be composed of points, constructive approaches, and non-Archimedean accounts that make essential use of infinitesimals.

Download or read book An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics A Reader written by Russell Marcus and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 896 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive collection of historical readings in the philosophy of mathematics and a selection of influential contemporary work, this much-needed introduction reveals the rich history of the subject. An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics: A Reader brings together an impressive collection of primary sources from ancient and modern philosophy. Arranged chronologically and featuring introductory overviews explaining technical terms, this accessible reader is easy-to-follow and unrivaled in its historical scope. With selections from key thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume and Kant, it connects the major ideas of the ancients with contemporary thinkers. A selection of recent texts from philosophers including Quine, Putnam, Field and Maddy offering insights into the current state of the discipline clearly illustrates the development of the subject. Presenting historical background essential to understanding contemporary trends and a survey of recent work, An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics: A Reader is required reading for undergraduates and graduate students studying the philosophy of mathematics and an invaluable source book for working researchers.

Download or read book Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times written by Morris Kline and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990-03-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive history traces the development of mathematical ideas and the careers of the men responsible for them. Volume 1 looks at the disciplines origins in Babylon and Egypt, the creation of geometry and trigonometry by the Greeks, and the role of mathematics in the medieval and early modern periods. Volume 2 focuses on calculus, the rise of analysis in the 19th century, and the number theories of Dedekind and Dirichlet. The concluding volume covers the revival of projective geometry, the emergence of abstract algebra, the beginnings of topology, and the influence of Godel on recent mathematical study.

Download or read book History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics written by William Aspray and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The fourteen essays in this volume build on the pioneering effort of Garrett Birkhoff, professor of mathematics at Harvard University, who in 1974 organized a conference of mathematicians and historians of modern mathematics to examine how the two disciplines approach the history of mathematics. In History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics, William Aspray and Philip Kitcher bring together distinguished scholars from mathematics, history, and philosophy to assess the current state of the field. Their essays, which grow out of a 1985 conference at the University of Minnesota, develop the basic premise that mathematical thought needs to be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective. The opening essays study issues arising within logic and the foundations of mathematics, a traditional area of interest to historians and philosophers. The second section examines issues in the history of mathematics within the framework of established historical periods and questions. Next come case studies that illustrate the power of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mathematics. The collection closes with a look at mathematics from a sociohistorical perspective, including the way institutions affect what constitutes mathematical knowledge.

Download or read book Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times Volume 3 written by Morris Kline and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990-03-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive history traces the development of mathematical ideas and the careers of the men responsible for them. Volume 1 looks at the discipline's origins in Babylon and Egypt, the creation of geometry and trigonometry by the Greeks, and the role of mathematics in the medieval and early modern periods. Volume 2 focuses on calculus, the rise of analysis in the nineteenth century, and the number theories of Dedekind and Dirichlet. The concluding volume covers the revival of projective geometry, the emergence of abstract algebra, the beginnings of topology, and the influence of Gödel on recent mathematical study.

Download or read book Philosophy of Mathematics written by James Robert Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-09 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy of Mathematics is an excellent introductory text. This student friendly book discusses the great philosophers and the importance of mathematics to their thought. It includes the following topics: * the mathematical image * platonism * picture-proofs * applied mathematics * Hilbert and Godel * knots and nations * definitions * picture-proofs and Wittgenstein * computation, proof and conjecture. The book is ideal for courses on philosophy of mathematics and logic.

Download or read book Mathematics A Concise History and Philosophy written by W.S. Anglin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a concise introductory textbook for a one-semester (40-class) course in the history and philosophy of mathematics. It is written for mathemat ics majors, philosophy students, history of science students, and (future) secondary school mathematics teachers. The only prerequisite is a solid command of precalculus mathematics. On the one hand, this book is designed to help mathematics majors ac quire a philosophical and cultural understanding of their subject by means of doing actual mathematical problems from different eras. On the other hand, it is designed to help philosophy, history, and education students come to a deeper understanding of the mathematical side of culture by means of writing short essays. The way I myself teach the material, stu dents are given a choice between mathematical assignments, and more his torical or philosophical assignments. (Some sample assignments and tests are found in an appendix to this book. ) This book differs from standard textbooks in several ways. First, it is shorter, and thus more accessible to students who have trouble coping with vast amounts of reading. Second, there are many detailed explanations of the important mathematical procedures actually used by famous mathe maticians, giving more mathematically talented students a greater oppor tunity to learn the history and philosophy by way of problem solving.

Download or read book Philosophy of Mathematics written by David Bostock and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides readers with a non-partisan discussion until the final chapter, which gives the author's personal opinion on where the truth lies.

Download or read book A Concise History of Mathematics for Philosophers written by John Stillwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element aims to present an outline of mathematics and its history, with particular emphasis on events that shook up its philosophy. It ranges from the discovery of irrational numbers in ancient Greece to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discoveries on the nature of infinity and proof. Recurring themes are intuition and logic, meaning and existence, and the discrete and the continuous. These themes have evolved under the influence of new mathematical discoveries and the story of their evolution is, to a large extent, the story of philosophy of mathematics.

Download or read book Classics in the History of Greek Mathematics written by Jean Christianidis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century is the period during which the history of Greek mathematics reached its greatest acme. Indeed, it is by no means exaggerated to say that Greek mathematics represents the unique field from the wider domain of the general history of science which was included in the research agenda of so many and so distinguished scholars, from so varied scientific communities (historians of science, historians of philosophy, mathematicians, philologists, philosophers of science, archeologists etc. ), while new scholarship of the highest quality continues to be produced. This volume includes 19 classic papers on the history of Greek mathematics that were published during the entire 20th century and affected significantly the state of the art of this field. It is divided into six self-contained sections, each one with its own editor, who had the responsibility for the selection of the papers that are republished in the section, and who wrote the introduction of the section. It constitutes a kind of a Reader book which is today, one century after the first publications of Tannery, Zeuthen, Heath and the other outstanding figures of the end of the 19th and the beg- ning of 20th century, rather timely in many respects.

Download or read book Mathematizing Space written by Vincenzo De Risi and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2015-01-31 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects the papers of the conference held in Berlin, Germany, 27-29 August 2012, on 'Space, Geometry and the Imagination from Antiquity to the Modern Age'. The conference was a joint effort by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and the Centro die Ricerca Matematica Ennio De Giorgi (Pisa).

Download or read book Tales of Impossibility written by David S. Richeson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive look at four of the most famous problems in mathematics Tales of Impossibility recounts the intriguing story of the renowned problems of antiquity, four of the most famous and studied questions in the history of mathematics. First posed by the ancient Greeks, these compass and straightedge problems—squaring the circle, trisecting an angle, doubling the cube, and inscribing regular polygons in a circle—have served as ever-present muses for mathematicians for more than two millennia. David Richeson follows the trail of these problems to show that ultimately their proofs—which demonstrated the impossibility of solving them using only a compass and straightedge—depended on and resulted in the growth of mathematics. Richeson investigates how celebrated luminaries, including Euclid, Archimedes, Viète, Descartes, Newton, and Gauss, labored to understand these problems and how many major mathematical discoveries were related to their explorations. Although the problems were based in geometry, their resolutions were not, and had to wait until the nineteenth century, when mathematicians had developed the theory of real and complex numbers, analytic geometry, algebra, and calculus. Pierre Wantzel, a little-known mathematician, and Ferdinand von Lindemann, through his work on pi, finally determined the problems were impossible to solve. Along the way, Richeson provides entertaining anecdotes connected to the problems, such as how the Indiana state legislature passed a bill setting an incorrect value for pi and how Leonardo da Vinci made elegant contributions in his own study of these problems. Taking readers from the classical period to the present, Tales of Impossibility chronicles how four unsolvable problems have captivated mathematical thinking for centuries.

Download or read book Philosophy of Mathematics written by Paul Benacerraf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-01-27 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century has witnessed an unprecedented 'crisis in the foundations of mathematics', featuring a world-famous paradox (Russell's Paradox), a challenge to 'classical' mathematics from a world-famous mathematician (the 'mathematical intuitionism' of Brouwer), a new foundational school (Hilbert's Formalism), and the profound incompleteness results of Kurt Gödel. In the same period, the cross-fertilization of mathematics and philosophy resulted in a new sort of 'mathematical philosophy', associated most notably (but in different ways) with Bertrand Russell, W. V. Quine, and Gödel himself, and which remains at the focus of Anglo-Saxon philosophical discussion. The present collection brings together in a convenient form the seminal articles in the philosophy of mathematics by these and other major thinkers. It is a substantially revised version of the edition first published in 1964 and includes a revised bibliography. The volume will be welcomed as a major work of reference at this level in the field.

Download or read book New Perspectives on Mathematical Practices written by Bart Van Kerkhove and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on the importance of historical enquiry for the appreciation of philosophical problems concerning mathematics. It contains a well-balanced mixture of contributions by internationally established experts, such as Jeremy Gray and Jens Hoyrup; upcoming scholars, such as Erich Reck and Dirk Schlimm; and young, promising researchers at the beginning of their careers. The book is situated within a relatively new and broadly naturalistic tradition in the philosophy of mathematics. In this alternative philosophical current, which has been dramatically growing in importance in the last few decades, unlike in the traditional schools, proper attention is paid to scientific practices as informing for philosophical accounts.