Related papers: Ten Misconceptions from the History of Analysis an…
I briefly consider the Kuhnian notion of "paradigm shifts" applied to the history of mathematics and argue that the succession and intergenerational continuity of mathematical thought was undeservedly neglected in the historical studies. To…
To account for the first proof of existence of an irrational magnitude, historians of science as well as commentators of Aristotle refer to the texts on the incommensurability of the diagonal in Prior Analytics, since they are the most…
This paper presents a systematic study of the prehistory of the traditional subsystems of second-order arithmetic that feature prominently in the reverse mathematics program of Friedman and Simpson. We look in particular at: (i) the long…
Informally speaking, the categoricity of an axiom system means that its non-logical symbols have only one possible interpretation that renders the axioms true. Although non-categoricity has become ubiquitous in the second half of the 20th…
In relation to a thesis put forward by Marx Wartofsky, we seek to show that a historiography of mathematics requires an analysis of the ontology of the part of mathematics under scrutiny. Following Ian Hacking, we point out that in the…
Leibniz scholarship is currently an area of lively debate. We respond to some recent criticisms by Archibald et al.
The definition of probabilities in eternally inflating universes requires a measure to regulate the infinite spacetime volume, and much of the current literature uses a global time cutoff for this purpose. Such measures have been found to…
The way Leibniz applied his philosophy to mathematics has been the subject of longstanding debates. A key piece of evidence is his letter to Masson on bodies. We offer an interpretation of this often misunderstood text, dealing with the…
We present an elementary proof of the prime number theorem. The relative error follows a golden ratio scaling law and respects the bound obtained from the Riemann's hypothesis. The proof is derived in the framework of a scale free…
Mathematical concepts and results have often been given a long history, stretching far back in time. Yet recent work in the history of mathematics has tended to focus on local topics, over a short term-scale, and on the study of ephemeral…
After a brief flirtation with logicism in 1917-1920, David Hilbert proposed his own program in the foundations of mathematics in 1920 and developed it, in concert with collaborators such as Paul Bernays and Wilhelm Ackermann, throughout the…
The classical Baldwin-Lachlan characterization of uncountably categorical theories is known to fail in continuous logic in that not every inseparably categorical theory has a strongly minimal set. Here we investigate these issues by…
Cut-elimination theorems constitute one of the most important classes of theorems of proof theory. Since Gentzen's proof of the cut-elimination theorem for the system $\mathbf{LK}$, several other proofs have been proposed. Even though the…
Reverse Mathematics (RM for short) is a program in the foundations of mathematics where the aim is to find the minimal axioms needed to prove a given theorem of ordinary mathematics. Generally, the minimal axioms are equivalent to the…
In this essay, I attempt to provide supporting evidence as well as some balance for the thesis on `Transforming socio-economics with a new epistemology' presented by Hollingworth and Mueller (2008). First, I review a personal highlight of…
The Weak Law of Large Numbers is traced chronologically from its inception as Jacob Bernoulli's Theorem in 1713, through De Moivre's Theorem, to ultimate forms due to Uspensky and Khinchin in the 1930s, and beyond. Both aspects of Jacob…
The discovery of the infinite integer leads to a partition between finite and infinite numbers. Construction of an infinitesimal and infinitary number system, the Gossamer numbers. Du Bois-Reymond's much-greater-than relations and…
It is often claimed that analysis with infinitesimals requires more substantial use of the Axiom of Choice than traditional elementary analysis. The claim is based on the observation that the hyperreals entail the existence of nonprincipal…
We introduce a generalization of the Cantor-Dedekind continuum with explicit infinitesimals. These infinitesimals are used as numbers obeying the same basic rules as the other elements of the generalized continuum, in accordance with…
The uncountability of the reals was first established by Cantor in what was later heralded as the first paper on set theory. Since the latter constitutes the official foundations of mathematics, the logical study of the uncountability of…