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Potential Infinity
In the philosophy of mathematics, the abstraction of actual infinity, also called completed infinity, involves infinite entities as given, actual and completed objects. The concept of actual infinity was introduced into mathematics near the end of the 19th century by Georg Cantor with his theory of infinite sets, and was later formalized into Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. This theory, which is presently commonly accepted as a foundation of mathematics, contains the axiom of infinity, which means that the natural numbers form a set (necessarily infinite). A great discovery of Cantor is that, if one accepts infinite sets, then there are different sizes ( cardinalities) of infinite sets, and, in particular, the cardinal of the continuum of the real numbers is strictly larger than the cardinal of the natural numbers. Actual infinity is to be contrasted with potential infinity, in which an endless process (such as "add 1 to the previous number") produces a sequence with no last el ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophy Of Mathematics
Philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of mathematics and its relationship to other areas of philosophy, particularly epistemology and metaphysics. Central questions posed include whether or not mathematical objects are purely abstract entities or are in some way concrete, and in what the relationship such objects have with physical reality consists. Major themes that are dealt with in philosophy of mathematics include: *''Reality'': The question is whether mathematics is a pure product of human mind or whether it has some reality by itself. *''Logic and rigor'' *''Relationship with physical reality'' *''Relationship with science'' *''Relationship with applications'' *''Mathematical truth'' *''Nature as human activity'' (science, the arts, art, game, or all together) Major themes Reality Logic and rigor Mathematical reasoning requires Mathematical rigor, rigor. This means that the definitions must be absolutely unambiguous and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plato
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms. He influenced all the major areas of theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, and was the founder of the Platonic Academy, a philosophical school in History of Athens, Athens where Plato taught the doctrines that would later become known as Platonism. Plato's most famous contribution is the theory of forms, theory of forms (or ideas), which aims to solve what is now known as the problem of universals. He was influenced by the pre-Socratic thinkers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, although much of what is known about them is derived from Plato himself. Along with his teacher Socrates, and his student Aristotle, Plato is a central figure in the history of Western philosophy. Plato's complete ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Curve (mathematics)
In mathematics, a curve (also called a curved line in older texts) is an object similar to a line, but that does not have to be straight. Intuitively, a curve may be thought of as the trace left by a moving point. This is the definition that appeared more than 2000 years ago in Euclid's ''Elements'': "The urvedline is ��the first species of quantity, which has only one dimension, namely length, without any width nor depth, and is nothing else than the flow or run of the point which ��will leave from its imaginary moving some vestige in length, exempt of any width." This definition of a curve has been formalized in modern mathematics as: ''A curve is the image of an interval to a topological space by a continuous function''. In some contexts, the function that defines the curve is called a ''parametrization'', and the curve is a parametric curve. In this article, these curves are sometimes called ''topological curves'' to distinguish them from more constrained curves suc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Line (mathematics)
In geometry, a straight line, usually abbreviated line, is an infinitely long object with no width, depth, or curvature, an idealization of such physical objects as a straightedge, a taut string, or a ray of light. Lines are spaces of dimension one, which may be embedded in spaces of dimension two, three, or higher. The word ''line'' may also refer, in everyday life, to a line segment, which is a part of a line delimited by two points (its ''endpoints''). Euclid's ''Elements'' defines a straight line as a "breadthless length" that "lies evenly with respect to the points on itself", and introduced several postulates as basic unprovable properties on which the rest of geometry was established. ''Euclidean line'' and ''Euclidean geometry'' are terms introduced to avoid confusion with generalizations introduced since the end of the 19th century, such as non-Euclidean, projective, and affine geometry. Properties In the Greek deductive geometry of Euclid's ''Elements'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pantheism
Pantheism can refer to a number of philosophical and religious beliefs, such as the belief that the universe is God, or panentheism, the belief in a non-corporeal divine intelligence or God out of which the universe arisesAnn Thomson; Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment, 2008, page 54. as opposed to the corporeal gods of religion such as Yahweh. The former idea came from Church theologians who, in attacking the latter form of pantheism, described pantheism as the belief that God is the material universe itself.Worman, J. H., "Pantheism", in ''Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, Volume 1'', John McClintock, James Strong (Eds), Harper & Brothers, 1896, pp. 616–624. Under some conceptions of pantheism, the universe is thought to be an immanent deity, still expanding and creating, which has existed since the beginning of time. Pantheism can include the belief that everything constitutes a unity and that t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Dedekind
Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind (; ; 6 October 1831 – 12 February 1916) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, abstract algebra (particularly ring theory), and the axiomatic foundations of arithmetic. His best known contribution is the definition of real numbers through the notion of Dedekind cut. He is also considered a pioneer in the development of modern set theory and of the philosophy of mathematics known as ''logicism''. Life Dedekind's father was Julius Levin Ulrich Dedekind, an administrator of Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig. His mother was Caroline Henriette Dedekind (née Emperius), the daughter of a professor at the Collegium. Richard Dedekind had three older siblings. As an adult, he never used the names Julius Wilhelm. He was born in Braunschweig (often called "Brunswick" in English), which is where he lived most of his life and died. His body rests at Braunschweig Main Cemetery. He first attended the Collegium Carol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Set Theory
Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies Set (mathematics), sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory – as a branch of mathematics – is mostly concerned with those that are relevant to mathematics as a whole. The modern study of set theory was initiated by the German mathematicians Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor in the 1870s. In particular, Georg Cantor is commonly considered the founder of set theory. The non-formalized systems investigated during this early stage go under the name of ''naive set theory''. After the discovery of Paradoxes of set theory, paradoxes within naive set theory (such as Russell's paradox, Cantor's paradox and the Burali-Forti paradox), various axiomatic systems were proposed in the early twentieth century, of which Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (with or without the axiom of choice) is still the best-known and most studied. Set the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bernard Bolzano
Bernard Bolzano (, ; ; ; born Bernardus Placidus Johann Nepomuk Bolzano; 5 October 1781 – 18 December 1848) was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian and Catholic priest of Italian extraction, also known for his liberal views. Bolzano wrote in German, his native language. For the most part, his work came to prominence posthumously. Family Bolzano was the son of two pious Catholics. His father, Bernard Pompeius Bolzano, was an Italian who had moved to Prague, where he married Maria Cecilia Maurer who came from Prague's German-speaking family Maurer. Only two of their twelve children lived to adulthood. Career When he was ten years old, Bolzano entered the Gymnasium of the Piarists in Prague, which he attended from 1791 to 1796. Bolzano entered the University of Prague in 1796 and studied mathematics, philosophy and physics. Starting in 1800, he also began studying theology, becoming a Catholic priest in 1804. He was appointed to the new chair of p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Foundational Crisis Of Mathematics
Foundations of mathematics are the logical and mathematical framework that allows the development of mathematics without generating self-contradictory theories, and to have reliable concepts of theorems, proofs, algorithms, etc. in particular. This may also include the philosophical study of the relation of this framework with reality. The term "foundations of mathematics" was not coined before the end of the 19th century, although foundations were first established by the ancient Greek philosophers under the name of Aristotle's logic and systematically applied in Euclid's ''Elements''. A mathematical assertion is considered as truth only if it is a theorem that is proved from true premises by means of a sequence of syllogisms ( inference rules), the premises being either already proved theorems or self-evident assertions called axioms or postulates. These foundations were tacitly assumed to be definitive until the introduction of infinitesimal calculus by Isaac Newt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; ; ; 30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician, astronomer, geodesist, and physicist, who contributed to many fields in mathematics and science. He was director of the Göttingen Observatory and professor of astronomy from 1807 until his death in 1855. While studying at the University of Göttingen, he propounded several mathematical theorems. As an independent scholar, he wrote the masterpieces '' Disquisitiones Arithmeticae'' and ''Theoria motus corporum coelestium''. Gauss produced the second and third complete proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra. In number theory, he made numerous contributions, such as the composition law, the law of quadratic reciprocity and the Fermat polygonal number theorem. He also contributed to the theory of binary and ternary quadratic forms, the construction of the heptadecagon, and the theory of hypergeometric series. Due to Gauss' extensive and fundamental contributions to science ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic and statistics. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his vast expertise across fields, which became a rarity after his lifetime with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of specialized labor. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science. Leibniz contributed to the field ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Galileo Galilei
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei ( , , ) or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. He was born in the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science. Galileo studied speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion and also worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of the pendulum and "hydrostatic balances". He was one of the earliest Renaissance developers of the thermoscope and the inventor of various sector (instrument), military compasses. With an improved telescope he built, he observed the stars of the Milky Way, the phases of Venus, the Galilean moons, four largest satellites of Jupiter, Saturn's r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
