Philosophy of mathematics is the branch of
philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of
mathematics.
Recurrent themes include:
- What are the sources of mathematical subject matter?
- What is the ontological status of mathematical entities?
- What does it mean to refer to a mathematical object?
- What is the character of a mathematical proposition?
- What is the relation between logic and mathematics?
- What is the role of hermeneutics in mathematics?
- What kinds of inquiry play a role in mathematics?
- What are the objectives of mathematical inquiry?
- What gives mathematics its hold on experience?
- What are the human traits behind mathematics?
- What is mathematical beauty?
- What is the source and nature of mathematical truth?
- What is the relationship between the abstract world of mathematics and the material universe?
The terms
philosophy of mathematics and
mathematical philosophy are frequently used as synonyms. The latter, however, may be used to mean at least three other things. One sense refers to a project of formalizing a philosophical subject matter, say,
aesthetics,
ethics,
logic,
metaphysics, or
theology, in a purportedly more exact and rigorous form, as for example the labors of
Scholastic theologians, or the systematic aims of
Leibniz and
Spinoza. Another sense refers to the working philosophy of an individual practitioner or a like-minded community of practicing mathematicians. Additionally, some understand the term mathematical philosophy to be an allusion to the approach taken by
Bertrand Russell in his book
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.
What are the sources of mathematical subject matter?
What is the
ontological status of mathematical entities?
What does it mean to refer to a mathematical object?
What is the character of a mathematical proposition?
What is the relation between
logic and mathematics?
What is the role of
hermeneutics in mathematics?
What kinds of inquiry play a role in mathematics?
What are the objectives of mathematical inquiry?
What gives mathematics its hold on
experience?
What are the
human traits behind mathematics?
What is
mathematical beauty?
What is the source and nature of mathematical truth?
What is the relationship between the abstract world of mathematics and the material universe?
Historical overview A perennial issue in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the relationship between logic and mathematics at their joint foundations. While
20th century philosophers continued to ask the questions mentioned at the outset of this article, the philosophy of mathematics in the 20th century was characterized by a predominant interest in
formal logic,
set theory, and foundational issues.
It is a profound puzzle that on the one hand mathematical truths seem to have a compelling inevitability, but on the other hand the source of their 'truthfullness' remains elusive. Investigations into this issue are known as the
foundations of mathematics program.
At the start of the century, philosophers of mathematics were already beginning to divide into various schools of thought about all these questions, broadly distinguished by their pictures of mathematical
epistemology and
ontology. Three schools,
formalism,
intuitionism, and
logicism, emerged at this time, partly in response to the increasingly widespread worry that mathematics as it stood, and
analysis in particular, did not live up to the standards of
certainty and
rigor that had been taken for granted. Each school addressed the issues that came to the fore at that time, either attempting to resolve them or claiming that mathematics is not entitled to its status as our most trusted knowledge.
Surprising and counterintuitive developments in
formal logic and
set theory early in the 20th century led to new questions concerning what was traditionally called the
foundations of mathematics. As the century unfolded, the initial focus of concern expanded to an open exploration of the fundamental axioms of mathematics, the axiomatic approach having been taken for granted since the time of
Euclid as the natural basis for mathematics. Core concepts such as
axiom,
order, and
set received fresh emphasis. In mathematics as in physics, new and unexpected ideas had arisen and significant changes were coming. Inquiries into the
consistency of mathematical theories led to the development of a new level of study, a reflective critique in which the theory under review "becomes itself the object of a mathematical study", what
Hilbert called
metamathematics or
proof theory (
Kleene, 55).
At the midpoint of the century, a new mathematical theory known as
category theory arose as a new contender for the natural language of mathematical thinking (Mac Lane 1998). As the 20th century progressed, however, philosophical opinions diverged as to just how well-founded were the questions about foundations that were raised at its opening.
Hilary Putnam summed up one common view of the situation in the last third of the century by saying:
When philosophy discovers something wrong with science, sometimes science has to be changed —
Russell's paradox comes to mind, as does
Berkeley's attack on the actual
infinitesimal — but more often it is philosophy that has to be changed. I do not think that the difficulties that philosophy finds with classical mathematics today are genuine difficulties; and I think that the philosophical interpretations of mathematics that we are being offered on every hand are wrong, and that 'philosophical interpretation' is just what mathematics doesn't need. (Putnam, 169–170).
Philosophy of mathematics today proceeds along several different lines of inquiry, by philosophers of mathematics, logicians, and mathematicians, and there are many schools of thought on the subject. The schools are addressed separately in the next section, and their assumptions explained.
Philosophy of mathematics in the 20th century Contemporary schools of thought Mathematical realism, like
realism in general, holds that mathematical entities exist independently of the human
mind. Thus humans do not invent mathematics, but rather discover it, and any other intelligent beings in the universe would presumably do the same. In this point of view, there is really one sort of mathematics that can be discovered:
Triangles, for example, are real entities, not the creations of the human mind.
Many working mathematicians have been mathematical realists; they see themselves as discoverers of naturally occurring objects. Examples include
Paul Erdős and
Kurt Gödel. Gödel believed in an objective mathematical reality that could be perceived in a manner analogous to sense perception. Certain principles (e.g., for any two objects, there is a collection of objects consisting of precisely those two objects) could be directly seen to be true, but some conjectures, like the
continuum hypothesis, might prove undecidable just on the basis of such principles. Gödel suggested that quasi-empirical methodology could be used to provide sufficient evidence to be able to reasonably assume such a conjecture.
Within realism, there are distinctions depending on what sort of existence one takes mathematical entities to have, and how we know about them.
Mathematical realism Platonism is the form of realism that suggests that mathematical entities are abstract, have no spatiotemporal or causal properties, and are eternal and unchanging. This is often claimed to be the naive view most people have of numbers. The term
Platonism is used because such a view is seen to parallel
Plato's belief in a "World of Ideas", an unchanging ultimate reality that the everyday world can only imperfectly approximate. The two ideas have a meaningful, not just a superficial connection, because Plato probably derived his understanding from the
Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, who believed that the world was, quite literally, generated by
numbers.
The major problem of mathematical platonism is this: precisely where and how do the mathematical entities exist, and how do we know about them? Is there a world, completely separate from our physical one, which is occupied by the mathematical entities? How can we gain access to this separate world and discover truths about the entities? One answer might be
Ultimate ensemble, which is a theory that postulates all structures that exist mathematically also exist physically in their own universe.
Gödel's platonism postulates a special kind of mathematical intuition that lets us perceive mathematical objects directly. (This view bears resemblances to many things
Husserl said about mathematics, and supports
Kant's idea that mathematics is
synthetic a priori.)
Davis and
Hersh have suggested in their book
The Mathematical Experience that most mathematicians act as though they are Platonists, even though, if pressed to defend the position carefully, they may retreat to formalism (see below).
Some mathematicians hold opinions that amount to more nuanced versions of Platonism. These ideas are sometimes described as
Neo-Platonism.
Platonism Logicism is the thesis that mathematics is reducible to logic, and hence nothing but a part of logic (Carnap 1931/1883, 41). Logicists hold that mathematics can be known
a priori, but suggest that our knowledge of mathematics is just part of our knowledge of logic in general, and is thus
analytic, not requiring any special faculty of mathematical intuition. In this view,
logic is the proper foundation of mathematics, and all mathematical statements are necessary logical truths.
Rudolf Carnap (1931) presents the logicist thesis in two parts:
1. |
The concepts of mathematics can be derived from logical concepts through explicit definitions. |
2. |
The theorems of mathematics can be derived from logical axioms through purely logical deduction. |
Gottlob Frege was the founder of logicism. In his seminal
Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (
Basic Laws of Arithmetic) he built up
arithmetic from a system of logic with a general principle of comprehension, which he called "Basic Law V" (for concepts
F and
G, the extension of
F equals the extension of
G if and only if for all objects
a,
Fa if and only if
Ga), a principle that he took to be acceptable as part of logic.
But Frege's construction was flawed.
Russell discovered that Basic Law V is inconsistent (this is
Russell's paradox). Frege abandoned his logicist program soon after this, but it was continued by Russell and
Whitehead. They attributed the paradox to "vicious circularity" and built up what they called
ramified type theory to deal with it. In this system, they were eventually able to build up much of modern mathematics but in an altered, and excessively complex, form (for example, there were different natural numbers in each type, and there were infinitely many types). They also had to make several compromises in order to develop so much of mathematics, such as an "
axiom of reducibility". Even Russell said that this axiom did not really belong to logic.
Modern logicists (like
Bob Hale,
Crispin Wright, and perhaps others) have returned to a program closer to Frege's. They have abandoned Basic Law V in favour of abstraction principles such as
Hume's principle (the number of objects falling under the concept
F equals the number of objects falling under the concept
G if and only if the extension of
F and the extension of
G can be put into
one-to-one correspondence). Frege required Basic Law V to be able to give an explicit definition of the numbers, but all the properties of numbers can be derived from Hume's principle. This would not have been enough for Frege because (to paraphrase him) it does not exclude the possibility that the number 3 is in fact Julius Caesar. In addition, many of the weakened principles that they have had to adopt to replace Basic Law V no longer seem so obviously analytic, and thus purely logical.
If mathematics is a part of logic, then questions about mathematical objects reduce to questions about logical objects. But what, one might ask, are the objects of logical concepts? In this sense, logicism can be seen as shifting questions about the philosophy of mathematics to questions about logic without fully answering them.
Logicism Empiricism is a form of realism that denies that mathematics can be known
a priori at all. It says that we discover mathematical facts by
empirical research, just like facts in any of the other sciences. It is not one of the classical three positions advocated in the early 20th century, but primarily arose in the middle of the century. However, an important early proponent of a view like this was
John Stuart Mill. Mill's view was widely criticized, because it makes statements like "2 + 2 = 4" come out as uncertain, contingent truths, which we can only learn by observing instances of two pairs coming together and forming a quartet.
Contemporary mathematical empiricism, formulated by
Quine and
Putnam, is primarily supported by the
indispensability argument: mathematics is indispensable to all empirical sciences, and if we want to believe in the reality of the phenomena described by the sciences, we ought also believe in the reality of those entities required for this description. That is, since physics needs to talk about
electrons to say why light bulbs behave as they do, then electrons must exist. Since physics needs to talk about numbers in offering any of its explanations, then numbers must exist. In keeping with Quine and Putnam's overall philosophies, this is a naturalistic argument. It argues for the existence of mathematical entities as the best explanation for experience, thus stripping mathematics of some of its distinctness from the other sciences.
Putnam strongly rejected the term "
Platonist" as implying an overly-specific
ontology that was not necessary to
mathematical practice in any real sense. He advocated a form of "pure realism" that rejected mystical notions of
truth and accepted much
quasi-empiricism in mathematics. Putnam was involved in coining the term "pure realism" (see below).
The most important criticism of empirical views of mathematics is approximately the same as that raised against Mill. If mathematics is just as empirical as the other sciences, then this suggests that its results are just as fallible as theirs, and just as contingent. In Mill's case the empirical justification comes directly, while in Quine's case it comes indirectly, through the coherence of our scientific theory as a whole. Quine suggests that mathematics seems completely certain because the role it plays in our web of belief is incredibly central, and that it would be extremely difficult for us to revise it, though not impossible.
For a philosophy of mathematics that attempts to overcome some of the shortcomings of Quine and Gödel's approaches by taking aspects of each see
Penelope Maddy's
Realism in Mathematics. Another example of a realist theory is the
embodied mind theory (see below).
For experimental evidence suggesting that one-day-old babies can do elementary arithmetic, see
Brian Butterworth.
Empiricism Formalism holds that mathematical statements may be thought of as statements about the consequences of certain string manipulation rules. For example, in the "game" of
Euclidean geometry (which is seen as consisting of some strings called "axioms", and some "rules of inference" to generate new strings from given ones), one can prove that the
Pythagorean theorem holds (that is, you can generate the string corresponding to the Pythagorean theorem). Mathematical truths are not about numbers and sets and triangles and the like — in fact, they aren't "about" anything at all!
Another version of formalism is often known as
deductivism. In deductivism, the Pythagorean theorem is not an absolute truth, but a relative one:
if you assign meaning to the strings in such a way that the rules of the game become true (ie, true statements are assigned to the axioms and the rules of inference are truth-preserving),
then you have to accept the theorem, or, rather, the interpretation you have given it must be a true statement. The same is held to be true for all other mathematical statements. Thus, formalism need not mean that mathematics is nothing more than a meaningless symbolic game. It is usually hoped that there exists some interpretation in which the rules of the game hold. (Compare this position to
structuralism.) But it does allow the working mathematician to continue in his or her work and leave such problems to the philosopher or scientist. Many formalists would say that in practice, the axiom systems to be studied will be suggested by the demands of science or other areas of mathematics.
A major early proponent of formalism was
David Hilbert, whose
program was intended to be a
complete and
consistent axiomatization of all of mathematics. ("Consistent" here means that no contradictions can be derived from the system.) Hilbert aimed to show the consistency of mathematical systems from the assumption that the "finitary arithmetic" (a subsystem of the usual
arithmetic of the positive
integers, chosen to be philosophically uncontroversial) was consistent. Hilbert's goals of creating a system of mathematics that is both complete and consistent was dealt a fatal blow by the second of
Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which states that sufficiently expressive consistent axiom systems can never prove their own consistency. Since any such axiom system would contain the finitary arithmetic as a subsystem, Gödel's theorem implied that it would be impossible to prove the system's consistency relative to that (since it would then prove its own consistency, which Gödel had shown was impossible). Thus, in order to show that any axiomatic system of mathematics is in fact consistent, one needs to first assume the consistency of a system of mathematics that is in a sense stronger than the system to be proven consistent.
Hilbert was initially a deductivist, but, as may be clear from above, he considered certain metamathematical methods to yield intrinsically meaningful results and was a realist with respect to the finitary arithmetic. Later, he held the opinion that there was no other meaningful mathematics whatsoever, regardless of interpretation.
Other formalists, such as
Rudolf Carnap,
Alfred Tarski and
Haskell Curry, considered mathematics to be the investigation of formal axiom systems.
Mathematical logicians study formal systems but are just as often realists as they are formalists.
Formalists are usually very tolerant and inviting to new approaches to logic, non-standard number systems, new set theories etc. The more games we study, the better. However, in all three of these examples, motivation is drawn from existing mathematical or philosophical concerns. The "games" are usually not arbitrary.
The main critique of formalism is that the actual mathematical ideas that occupy mathematicians are far removed from the minute string manipulation games mentioned above. While published proofs (if correct) could in principle be formulated in terms of these games, the effort required in space and time would be prohibitive (witness
Principia Mathematica.) In addition, the rules are certainly not substantial to the initial creation of those proofs. Formalism is also silent to the question of which axiom systems ought to be studied.
Formalism Main article: Mathematical intuitionism Intuitionism Main article: Mathematical constructivism Constructivism Fictionalism was introduced in 1980 when
Hartry Field published
Science Without Numbers, which rejected and in fact reversed Quine's indispensability argument. Where Quine suggested that mathematics was indispensable for our best scientific theories, and therefore should be accepted as a body of truths talking about independently existing entities, Field suggested that mathematics was dispensable, and therefore should be considered as a body of falsehoods not talking about anything real. He did this by giving a complete axiomatization of
Newtonian mechanics that didn't reference numbers or functions at all. He started with the "betweenness" of
Hilbert's axioms to characterize space without coordinatizing it, and then added extra relations between points to do the work formerly done by
vector fields. Hilbert's geometry is mathematical, because it talks about abstract points, but in Field's theory, these points are the concrete points of physical space, so no special mathematical objects at all are needed.
Having shown how to do science without using mathematics, he proceeded to rehabilitate mathematics as a kind of
useful fiction. He showed that mathematical physics is a
conservative extension of his non-mathematical physics (that is, every physical fact provable in mathematical physics is already provable from his system), so that the mathematics is a reliable process whose physical applications are all true, even though its own statements are false. Thus, when doing mathematics, we can see ourselves as telling a sort of story, talking as if numbers existed. For Field, a statement like "2 + 2 = 4" is just as false as "
Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street" — but both are true according to the relevant fictions.
By this account, there are no metaphysical or epistemological problems special to mathematics. The only worries left are the general worries about non-mathematical physics, and about
fiction in general. Field's approach has been very influential, but is widely rejected. This is in part because of the requirement of strong fragments of
second-order logic to carry out his reduction, and because the statement of conservativity seems to require
quantification over abstract models or deductions. Another objection is that it is not clear how one could have certain results in science, such as quantum theory or the periodic table, without mathematics. If what distinguishes one element from another is *precisely* the number of electrons, neutrons and protons, how does one distinguish between elements without a concept of number?
Fictionalism Embodied mind theories hold that mathematical thought is a natural outgrowth of the human cognitive apparatus which finds itself in our physical universe. For example, the abstract concept of
number springs from the experience of counting discrete objects. It is held that mathematics is not universal and does not exist in any real sense, other than in human brains. Humans construct, but do not discover, mathematics.
With this view, the physical universe can thus be seen as the ultimate foundation of mathematics: it guided the evolution of the brain and later determined which questions this brain would find worthy of investigation. However, the human mind has no special claim on reality or approaches to it built out of math. If such constructs as
Euler's identity are true then they are true as a map of the human mind and
cognition.
Embodied mind theorists thus explain the effectiveness of mathematics — mathematics was constructed by the brain in order to be effective in this universe.
The most accessible, famous, and infamous treatment of this perspective is
Where Mathematics Comes From, by
George Lakoff and
Rafael E. Núñez. In addition, mathematician
Keith Devlin has investigated similar concepts with his book
The Math Instinct. For more on the science that inspired this perspective, see
cognitive science of mathematics.
Embodied mind theories Social constructivism or
social realism theories see mathematics primarily as a
social construct, as a product of culture, subject to correction and change. Like the other sciences, mathematics is viewed as an empirical endeavor whose results are constantly evaluated and may be discarded. However, while on an empiricist view the evaluation is some sort of comparison with 'reality', social constructivists emphasize that the direction of mathematical research is dictated by the fashions of the social group performing it or by the needs of the society financing it. However, although such external forces may change the direction of some mathematical research, there are strong internal constraints- the mathematical traditions, methods, problems, meanings and values into which mathematicians are enculturated- that work to conserve the historically defined discipline.
This runs counter to the traditional beliefs of working mathematicians, that mathematics is somehow pure or objective. But social constructivists argue that mathematics is in fact grounded by much uncertainty: as
mathematical practice evolves, the status of previous mathematics is cast into doubt, and is corrected to the degree it is required or desired by the current mathematical community. This can be seen in the development of analysis from reexamination of the calculus of Leibniz and Newton. They argue further that finished mathematics is often accorded too much status, and
folk mathematics not enough, due to an over-emphasis on axiomatic proof and peer review as practices. However, this might be seen as merely saying that rigorously proven results are overemphasized, and then "look how chaotic and uncertain the rest of it all is!"
The social nature of mathematics is highlighted in its
subcultures. Major discoveries can be made in one branch of mathematics and be relevant to another, yet the relationship goes undiscovered for lack of social contact between mathematicians. Social constructivists argue each speciality forms its own
epistemic community and often has great difficulty communicating, or motivating the investigation of
unifying conjectures that might relate different areas of mathematics. Social constructivists see the process of 'doing mathematics' as actually creating the meaning, while social realists see a deficiency either of human capacity to abstractify, or of human's
cognitive bias, or of mathematicians'
collective intelligence as preventing the comprehension of a real universe of mathematical objects. Social constructivists sometimes reject the search for foundations of mathematics as bound to fail, as pointless or even meaningless. Some social scientists also argue that mathematics is not real or objective at all, but is affected by
racism and
ethnocentrism. Some of these ideas are close to
postmodernism.
Contributions to this school have been made by
Imre Lakatos and
Thomas Tymoczko, although it is not clear that either would endorse the title. More recently
Paul Ernest has explicitly formulated a social constructivist philosophy of mathematics.
[1] Some consider the work of
Paul Erdős as a whole to have advanced this view (although he personally rejected it) because of his uniquely broad collaborations, which prompted others to see and study "mathematics as a social activity", e.g. via the
Erdős number.
Reuben Hersh has also promoted the social view of mathematics, calling it a 'humanistic' approach
[2], similar to but not quite the same as that associated with Alvin White
[3]; one of Hersh's co-authors,
Philip J. Davis, has expressed sympathy for the social view as well.
A criticism of this approach is that it is trivial, based on the trivial observation that mathematics is a human activity. To observe that rigorous proof comes only after unrigorous conjecture, experimentation and speculation is true, but it is trivial and noone would deny this. So it's a bit of a stretch to characterize a philosophy of mathematics in this way, on something trivially true. The calculus of Leibniz and Newton was reexamined by mathematicians such as Weierstrauss in order to rigorously prove the theorems thereof. There is nothing special or interesting about this, as it fits in with the more general trend of unrigorous ideas which are later made rigorous. There needs to be a clear distinction between the objects of study of mathematics and the study of the objects of study of mathematics. The former doesn't seem to change a great deal; the latter is forever in flux. The latter is what the Social theory is about, and the former is what Platonism et al. are about.
Social constructivism or social realism Rather than focus on narrow debates about the true nature of mathematical
truth, or even on practices unique to mathematicians such as the
proof, a growing movement from the
1960s to the
1990s began to question the idea of seeking foundations or finding any one right answer to why mathematics works. The starting point for this was
Eugene Wigner's famous
1960 paper
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, in which he argued that the happy coincidence of mathematics and physics being so well matched seemed to be unreasonable and hard to explain.
The embodied-mind or cognitive school and the social school were responses to this challenge, but the debates raised were difficult to confine to those.
Beyond the traditional schools One parallel concern that does not actually challenge the schools directly but instead questions their focus is the notion of
quasi-empiricism in mathematics. This grew from the increasingly popular assertion in the late 20th century that no one
foundation of mathematics could be ever proven to exist. It is also sometimes called 'postmodernism in mathematics' although that term is considered overloaded by some and insulting by others. Quasi-empiricism argues that in doing their research, mathematicians test hypotheses as well as proving theorems. A mathematical argument can transmit falsity from the conclusion to the premises just as well as it can transmit truth from the premises to the conclusion.
Quasi-empiricism was developed by
Imre Lakatos, inspired by the philosophy of science of
Karl Popper.
Lakatos's philosophy of mathematics is sometimes regarded as a kind of social constructivism, but this was not his intention.
Such methods have always been part of
folk mathematics by which great feats of calculation and measurement are sometimes achieved. Indeed, such methods may be the only notion of proof a culture has.
Hilary Putnam has argued that any theory of mathematical realism would include quasi-empirical methods. He proposed that an alien species doing mathematics might well rely on quasi-empirical methods primarily, being willing often to forgo rigorous and axiomatic proofs, and still be doing mathematics - at perhaps a somewhat greater risk of failure of their calculations. He gave a detailed argument for this in
New Directions (ed. Tymockzo, 1998).
Quasi-empiricism Some practitioners and scholars who are not engaged primarily in proof-oriented approaches have suggested an interesting and important theory about the nature of mathematics. For example,
Judea Pearl claimed that all of mathematics as presently understood was based on an
algebra of seeing - and proposed an
algebra of doing to complement it - this is a central concern of the
philosophy of action and other studies of how
knowledge relates to
action. The most important output of this was new theories of
truth, notably those appropriate to
activism and grounding
empirical methods.
Action Few philosophers are able to penetrate mathematical notations and culture to relate conventional notions of
metaphysics to the more specialized metaphysical notions of the schools above. This may lead to a disconnection in which some mathematicians continue to profess discredited philosophy as a justification for their continued belief in a world-view promoting their work.
Although the social theories and quasi-empiricism, and especially the embodied mind theory, have focused more attention on the
epistemology implied by current mathematical practices, they fall far short of actually relating this to ordinary human
perception and everyday understandings of
knowledge.
Unification Innovations in the
philosophy of language during the 20th century renewed interest in the question as to whether mathematics is, as if often said, the
language of science. Although most mathematicians and physicists (and many philosophers) would accept the statement "
mathematics is a language", linguists believe that the implications of such a statement must be considered. For example, the tools of
linguistics are not generally applied to the symbol systems of mathematics, that is, mathematics is studied in a markedly different way than other languages. If mathematics is a language, it is a different type of language than
natural languages. Indeed, because of the need for clarity and specificity, the language of mathematics is far more constrained than natural languages studied by linguists. However, the methods developed by
Gottlob Frege and
Alfred Tarski for the study of mathematical language have been extended greatly by Tarski's student
Richard Montague and other linguists working in
formal semantics to show that the distinction between mathematical language and natural language may not be as great as it seems.
See also
philosophy of language.
Language Many practising mathematicians have been drawn to their subject because of a sense of
beauty they perceive in it. One sometimes hears the sentiment that mathematicians would like to leave philosophy to the philosophers and get back to mathematics- where, presumably, the beauty lies.
In his work on the
divine proportion, H. E. Huntley relates the feeling of reading and understanding someone else's proof of a theorem of mathematics to that of a viewer of a masterpiece of art - the reader of a proof has a similar sense of exhilaration at understanding as the original author of the proof, much as, he argues, the viewer of a masterpiece has a sense of exhilaration similar to the original painter or sculptor. Indeed, one can study mathematical and scientific writings as
literature.
Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh have commented that the sense of mathematical beauty is universal amongst practicing mathematicians. By way of example, they provide two proofs of the irrationality of the
√2. The first is the traditional proof by
contradiction, ascribed to
Euclid; the second is a more direct proof involving the
fundamental theorem of arithmetic that, they argue, gets to the heart of the issue. Davis and Hersh argue that mathematicians find the second proof more aesthetically appealing because it gets closer to the nature of the problem.
Paul Erdős was well-known for his notion of a hypothetical "Book" containing the most elegant or beautiful mathematical proofs. There is not universal agreement that a result has one "most elegant" proof;
Gregory Chaitin has argued against this idea.
Philosophers have sometimes criticized mathematicians' sense of beauty or elegance as being, at best, vaguely stated. By the same token, however, philosophers of mathematics have sought to characterize what makes one proof more desirable than another when both are logically sound.
Another aspect of aesthetics concerning mathematics is mathematicians' views towards the possible uses of mathematics for purposes deemed unethical or inappropriate. The best-known exposition of this view occurs in
G.H. Hardy's book
A Mathematician's Apology, in which Hardy argues that pure mathematics is superior in beauty to
applied mathematics precisely because it cannot be used for war and similar ends. Some later mathematicians have characterized Hardy's views as mildly dated
Aesthetics See also Axiomatic set theory Axiomatic system Category theory Formal language Formal system Foundations of mathematics Golden ratio History of mathematics Intuitionistic logic Logic Mathematical beauty Mathematical constructivism Mathematical logic Mathematical proof Metamathematics Model theory Naive set theory Non-standard analysis Philosophy of language Philosophy of science Philosophy of probability Proof theory Rule of inference Science studies Scientific method Set theory Truth The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences Related topics The Analyst Euclid's Elements Gödel's completeness theorem Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy Kaina Stoicheia New Foundations Principia Mathematica The Simplest Mathematics Related works History and philosophy of science History of mathematics History of philosophy
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