Exploring Felix Klein's contested modernism
History and Overview
2024-02-02 v1 Mathematical Physics
math.MP
Abstract
An alleged opposition between David Hilbert and Felix Klein as modern vs countermodern has been pursued by marxist historian Herbert Mehrtens and others. Scholars such as Epple, Grattan-Guinness, Gray, Quinn, Rowe, and recently Siegmund-Schultze and Mazzotti have voiced a range of opinions concerning Mehrtens' dialectical methodology. We explore contrasting perspectives on Klein's contested modernism, as well as Hilbert's and Klein's views on intuition, logic, and physics. We analyze Jeremy Gray's comment on Klein's ethnographic speculations concerning Jewish mathematicians and find it to be untenable. We argue that Mehrtens was looking for countermoderns at the wrong address.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2402.00122,
title = {Exploring Felix Klein's contested modernism},
author = {Peter Heinig and Mikhail G. Katz and Karl Kuhlemann and Jan Peter Schaefermeyer and David Sherry},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.00122},
year = {2024}
}
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32 pages