Related papers: Exploring Felix Klein's contested modernism
Historian Herbert Mehrtens sought to portray the history of turn-of-the-century mathematics as a struggle of modern vs countermodern, led respectively by David Hilbert and Felix Klein. Some of Mehrtens' conclusions have been picked up by…
This paper contains a case study of the work and self-definition of two important mathematicians during the rise of modern mathematics: Felx Hausdorff (1868--1942) and Hermann Weyl (1885--1955). The two had strongly diverging positions with…
We discuss the mathematician George Bruce Halsted's accusations against Carl Friedrich Gauss, as well as refutations both by the latter's American grandson Robert Gauss in a letter to Felix Klein, and by the historian of mathematics Florian…
In 1917 F. Klein proposed his work on projective geometry to A. Einstein for further developments of general relativity. Klein had a peculiar way to consider the relationship between mathematics and physics, based on his Erlanger Programm…
Foundations of Science recently published a rebuttal to a portion of our essay it published two years ago. The author, G. Schubring, argues that our 2013 text treated unfairly his 2005 book, Conflicts between generalization, rigor, and…
In this article we pay tribute to Herbert Dingle for his early call to re-assess special relativity from philosophical and logical perspectives. However, we disagree with Dingle about a number of issues particularly his failure to…
We compare several approaches to the history of mathematics recently proposed by Blasjo, Fraser--Schroter, Fried, and others. We argue that tools from both mathematics and history are essential for a meaningful history of the discipline. In…
Leibniz scholarship is currently an area of lively debate. We respond to some recent criticisms by Archibald et al.
We survey the history and recent developments around two decades-old problems that continue to attract a great deal of interest: the slicing $\times 2$, $\times 3$ conjecture of H. Furstenberg in ergodic theory, and the distance set problem…
Disagreements that resist rational resolution, often termed ``deep disagreements'', have been the focus of much work in epistemology and informal logic. In this paper, I argue that they also deserve the attention of philosophers of…
A small and unsystematic selection of my favorite appearances of mathematicians and mathematics in German literature. It includes classic and romantic (Lessing, Goethe, Wezel, F. Schlegel, Kleist, Novalis, Grillparzer, Heine), modern…
Felix Klein's so-called Erlangen Program was published in 1872 as professoral dissertation. It proposed a new solution to the problem how to classify and characterize geometries on the basis of projective geometry and group theory. The…
Here we review a kind of post-World-War-II "Nachtrag" to H. Weyl's philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s. In a talk given at Z\"urich in the late 1940s, Weyl discussed…
Many historians of the calculus deny significant continuity between infinitesimal calculus of the 17th century and 20th century developments such as Robinson's theory. Robinson's hyperreals, while providing a consistent theory of…
Almost from the inception of Hilbert's program, foundational and structural efforts in proof theory have been directed towards the goal of clarifying the computational content of modern mathematical methods. This essay surveys various…
Putnam and Finkelstein can be read as providing an answer to Kripke's skeptical argument by appealing to the way mathematics is commonly pursued. Nowadays, the debate surrounding pluralism has questioned the postulation of a unique way of…
This paper undertakes a foundational inquiry into logical inferentialism with particular emphasis on the normative standards it establishes and the implications these pose for classical logic. The central question addressed herein is: 'What…
The gap between high school and university level mathematics has long been deemed problematic. Felix Klein referred to this gap as the ''double discontinuity'' meaning that students come to university unprepared for university courses and…
Adrian Kent has recently criticized Masanes, Galley and M\"uller's work on postulates for quantum mechanics. MGM claim to find two contradictions in Kent's criticism. I argue that neither is a true contradiction unless some other premise is…
It is well-known that Klein's lectures on the icosahedron and the solution of equations of fifth degree is one of the most important and influential books of 19th-century mathematics. In the present paper, we will give the complex…