Enlarging One's Stall: Reflections upon Logic's Role within the Growth of Nineteenth Century Mathematics

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• Mark Wilson (Pittsburgh)
• Thursday 02 June 2011, 14:00-15:00
• Meeting room 14, Centre for Mathematical Sciences.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Set Theory and Logic.

Mark Wilson does History and Philosophy of Mathematics at Pittsburgh. I have heard him talk about the foundational problems in Nineteenth Century Mathematics *before* the famous ``crisis in foundations'' (the paradoxes etc) that we of course all know

In their Introduction to Quaternions (1882), Kelland and Tait wrote: ``It is only by standing loose for a time to logical accuracy that extensions in the abstract sciences… are effected…The moment an extended idea [of multiplication] was entertained, ever so illogically, that moment fractional arithmetic started into existence.’‘

I shall attempt to survey some of the ways in which

mathematicians of the time (such as Klein, Dedekind and Frege) attempted to tame the unmoored empiricism implicit in this quotation.

This talk is part of the Dr Thomas Forster series.

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