Related papers: To found or not to found: that is the question
The classical platonist/formalist dilemma in philosophy of mathematics can be expressed in lay terms as a deceptively naive question: is new mathematics discovered or invented? Using an example from my own mathematical life, I argue that…
In this article, I discuss the relationship of mathematics to the physical world, and to other spheres of human knowledge. In particular, I argue that Mathematics is created by human beings, and the number $\pi$ can not be said to have…
There are different meanings of foundation of mathematics: philosophical, logical, and mathematical. Here foundations are considered as a theory that provides means (concepts, structures, methods etc.) for the development of whole…
In 1693, Gottfried Whilhelm Leibniz published in the Acta Eruditorum a geometrical proof of the fundamental theorem of the calculus. During his notorious dispute with Isaac Newton on the development of the calculus, Leibniz denied any…
The classical platonist / formalist dilemma in philosophy of mathematics can be expressed in lay terms as a deceptively naive question: \emph{Is new mathematics discovered or invented? Using examples from my own mathematical work during the…
People typically consider only European mathematics as orthodox, often intentionally or unintentionally overlooking the existence of mathematics from non-European societies. Inspired by Maria Ascher's two well-known papers on sand drawings…
Now that we have reached the centennial of Erwin Schrodinger's seminal paper introducing the wavefunction theory of matter, it is right and proper to inquire as to its legacy. It is undeniable that today every paper in atomic physics cites…
As the etymology of the word shows, logic is intimately related to language, as exemplified by the work of philosophers from Antiquity and from the Middle-Age. At the beginning of the XX century, the crisis of the foundations of mathematics…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
The received Hilbert-style axiomatic foundations of mathematics has been designed by Hilbert and his followers as a tool for meta-theoretical research. Foundations of mathematics of this type fail to satisfactory perform more basic and more…
The purpose of this work is to give a first approach to the dynamical behavior of Schr\"oder's method, a well known iterative process for solving nonlinear equations. In this context we consider equations defined in the complex plane. By…
The aim of this paper is to study the historical evolution of mathematical thinking and its spatial spreading. To do so, we have collected and integrated data from different online academic datasets. In its final stage, the database…
The foundations of mathematics have long been considered settled by the Zermelo-Fraenkel-Choice axioms. But set theory abounds in models with different truths and even classical questions such as the measurability of projective sets can…
In the seminal essay, "On the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences," physicist Eugene Wigner poses a fundamental philosophical question concerning the relationship between a physical system and our capacity to…
A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific…
The recent trend in mathematics is towards a framework of abstract mathematical objects, rather than the more concrete approach of explicitly defining elements which objects were thought to consist of. A natural question to raise is whether…
This text is based on an invited talk at the Dedekind Symposium at Braunschweig in October 2016. It summarizes views from my recent commented edition of Dedekinds two books on the foundations of mathematics.
The set of Schr\"oder words (Schr\"oder language) is endowed with a natural partial order, which can be conveniently described by interpreting Schr\"oder words as lattice paths. The resulting poset is called the Schr\"oder pattern poset. We…
We re-examine the old question to what extent mathematics may be compared with a game. Mainly inspired by Hilbert and Wittgenstein, our answer is that mathematics is something like a rhododendron of language games, where the rules are…
This article was motivated by the discovery of a potential new foundation for mainstream mathematics. The goals are to clarify the relationships between primitives, foundations, and deductive practice; to understand how to determine what…