Foundations of mathematics, the study of the logical and philosophical basis of mathematics, including whether the axioms of a given system ensure its completeness and its consistency. Because mathematics has served as a model for rational inquiry in the West and is used extensively in the sciences, foundational studies have far-reaching consequences for the reliability and extensibility of rational thought itself.
For 2,000 years the foundations of mathematics seemed perfectly solid. Euclid’s Elements (c. 300 bce), which presented a set of formal logical arguments based on a few basic terms and axioms, provided a systematic method of rational exploration that guided mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists well into the 19th century. Even serious objections to the lack of rigour in Sir Isaac Newton’s notion of fluxions (derivatives) in the calculus, raised by the Anglo-Irish empiricist George Berkeley (among others), did not call into question the basic foundations of mathematics. The discovery in the 19th century of consistent alternative geometries, however, precipitated a crisis, for it showed that Euclidean geometry, based on seemingly the most intuitively obvious axiomatic assumptions, did not correspond with reality as mathematicians had believed. This, together with the bold discoveries of the German mathematician Georg Cantor in set theory, made it clear that, to avoid further confusion and satisfactorily answer paradoxical results, a new and more rigorous foundation for mathematics was necessary.
Thus began the 20th-century quest to rebuild mathematics on a new basis independent of geometric intuitions. Early efforts included those of the logicist school of the British mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, the formalist school of the German mathematician David Hilbert, the intuitionist school of the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer, and the French set theory school of mathematicians collectively writing under the pseudonym of Nicolas Bourbaki. Some of the most promising current research is based on the development of category theory by the American mathematician Saunders Mac Lane and the Polish-born American mathematician Samuel Eilenberg following World War II.
This article presents the historical background of foundational questions and 20th-century efforts to construct a new foundational basis for mathematics.
Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment
A remarkable amount of practical mathematics, some of it even fairly sophisticated, was already developed as early as 2000 bce by the agricultural civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia and perhaps even farther east. However, the first to exhibit an interest in the foundations of mathematics were the ancient Greeks.
Arithmetic or geometry
Early Greek philosophy was dominated by a dispute as to which is more basic, arithmetic or geometry, and thus whether mathematics should be concerned primarily with the (positive) integers or the (positive) reals, the latter then being conceived as ratios of geometric quantities. (The Greeks confined themselves to positive numbers, as negative numbers were introduced only much later in India by Brahmagupta.) Underlying this dispute was a perceived basic dichotomy, not confined to mathematics but pervading all nature: is the universe made up of discrete atoms (as the philosopher Democritus believed) which hence can be counted, or does it consist of one or more continuous substances (as Thales of Miletus is reputed to have believed) and thus can only be measured? This dichotomy was presumably inspired by a linguistic distinction, analogous to that between English count nouns, such as “apple,” and mass nouns, such as “water.” As Aristotle later pointed out, in an effort to mediate between these divergent positions, water can be measured by counting cups.
The Pythagorean school of mathematics, founded on the doctrines of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, originally insisted that only natural and rational numbers exist. Its members only reluctantly accepted the discovery that √2, the ratio of the diagonal of a square to its side, could not be expressed as the ratio of whole numbers. The remarkable proof of this fact has been preserved by Aristotle.
The contradiction between rationals and reals was finally resolved by Eudoxus of Cnidus, a disciple of Plato, who pointed out that two ratios of geometric quantities are equal if and only if they partition the set of (positive) rationals in the same way, thus anticipating the German mathematician Richard Dedekind (1831–1916), who defined real numbers as such partitions.
Being versus becoming
Another dispute among pre-Socratic philosophers was more concerned with the physical world. Parmenides claimed that in the real world there is no such thing as change and that the flow of time is an illusion, a view with parallels in the Einstein-Minkowski four-dimensional space-time model of the universe. Heracleitus, on the other hand, asserted that change is all-pervasive and is reputed to have said that one cannot step into the same river twice.
Zeno of Elea, a follower of Parmenides, claimed that change is actually impossible and produced four paradoxes to show this. The most famous of these describes a race between Achilles and a tortoise. Since Achilles can run much faster than the tortoise, let us say twice as fast, the latter is allowed a head start of one mile. When Achilles has run one mile, the tortoise will have run half as far again—that is, half a mile. When Achilles has covered that additional half-mile, the tortoise will have run a further quarter-mile. After n + 1 stages, Achilles has run
miles and the tortoise has run
miles, being still 1/2n + 1 miles ahead. So how can Achilles ever catch up with the tortoise (see figure)?
Zeno’s paradoxes may also be interpreted as showing that space and time are not made up of discrete atoms but are substances which are infinitely divisible. Mathematically speaking, his argument involves the sum of the infinite geometric progression
no finite partial sum of which adds up to 2. As Aristotle would later say, this progression is only potentially infinite. It is now understood that Zeno was trying to come to grips with the notion of limit, which was not formally explained until the 19th century, although a start in that direction had been made by the French encyclopaedist Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83).
The Athenian philosopher Plato believed that mathematical entities are not just human inventions but have a real existence. For instance, according to Plato, the number 2 is an ideal object. This is sometimes called an “idea,” from the Greek eide, or “universal,” from the Latin universalis, meaning “that which pertains to all.” But Plato did not have in mind a “mental image,” as “idea” is usually used. The number 2 is to be distinguished from a collection of two stones or two apples or, for that matter, two platinum balls in Paris.
What, then, are these Platonic ideas? Already in ancient Alexandria some people speculated that they are words. This is why the Greek word logos, originally meaning “word,” later acquired a theological meaning as denoting the ultimate reality behind the “thing.” An intense debate occurred in the Middle Ages over the ontological status of universals. Three dominant views prevailed: realism, from the Latin res (“thing”), which asserts that universals have an extra-mental reality—that is, they exist independently of perception; conceptualism, which asserts that universals exist as entities within the mind but have no extra-mental existence; and nominalism, from the Latin nomen (“name”), which asserts that universals exist neither in the mind nor in the extra-mental realm but are merely names that refer to collections of individual objects.
It would seem that Plato believed in a notion of truth independent of the human mind. In the Meno Plato’s teacher Socrates asserts that it is possible to come to know this truth by a process akin to memory retrieval. Thus, by clever questioning, Socrates managed to bring an uneducated person to “remember,” or rather to reconstruct, the proof of a mathematical theorem.
Perhaps the most important contribution to the foundations of mathematics made by the ancient Greeks was the axiomatic method and the notion of proof. This was insisted upon in Plato’s Academy and reached its high point in Alexandria about 300 bce with Euclid’s Elements. This notion survives today, except for some cosmetic changes.
The idea is this: there are a number of basic mathematical truths, called axioms or postulates, from which other true statements may be derived in a finite number of steps. It may take considerable ingenuity to discover a proof; but it is now held that it must be possible to check mechanically, step by step, whether a purported proof is indeed correct, and nowadays a computer should be able to do this. The mathematical statements that can be proved are called theorems, and it follows that, in principle, a mechanical device, such as a modern computer, can generate all theorems.
Two questions about the axiomatic method were left unanswered by the ancients: are all mathematical truths axioms or theorems (this is referred to as completeness), and can it be determined mechanically whether a given statement is a theorem (this is called decidability)? These questions were raised implicitly by David Hilbert (1862–1943) about 1900 and were resolved later in the negative, completeness by the Austrian-American logician Kurt Gödel (1906–78) and decidability by the American logician Alonzo Church (1903–95).
Euclid’s work dealt with number theory and geometry, essentially all the mathematics then known. Since the middle of the 20th century a gradually changing group of mostly French mathematicians under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki has tried to emulate Euclid in writing a new Elements of Mathematics based on their theory of structures. Unfortunately, they just missed out on the new ideas from category theory.AD!!!!
While the ancient Greeks were familiar with the positive integers, rationals, and reals, zero (used as an actual number instead of denoting a missing number) and the negative numbers were first used in India, as far as is known, by Brahmagupta in the 7th century ce. Complex numbers were introduced by the Italian Renaissance mathematician and physician Gerolamo Cardano (1501–76), not just to solve equations such as x2 + 1 = 0 but because they were needed to find real solutions of certain cubic equations with real coefficients. Much later, the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) proved the fundamental theorem of algebra, that all equations with complex coefficients have complex solutions, thus removing the principal motivation for introducing new numbers. Still, the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–65) and the French mathematician Olinde Rodrigues (1794–1851) invented quaternions in the mid-19th century, but these proved to be less popular in the scientific community until quite recently.
Currently, a logical presentation of the number system, as taught at the university level, would be as follows:N → Z → Q → R → C → H. Here the letters, introduced by Nicolas Bourbaki, refer to the natural numbers, integers, rationals, reals, complex numbers, and quaternions, respectively, and the arrows indicate inclusion of each number system into the next. However, as has been shown, the historical development proceeds differently:N+ → Q+ → R+ → R → C → H, where the plus sign indicates restriction to positive elements. This is the development, up to R, which is often adhered to at the high-school level.
The reexamination of infinity
Calculus reopens foundational questions
Although mathematics flourished after the end of the Classical Greek period for 800 years in Alexandria and, after an interlude in India and the Islamic world, again in Renaissance Europe, philosophical questions concerning the foundations of mathematics were not raised until the invention of calculus and then not by mathematicians but by the philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753).
Sir Isaac Newton in England and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany had independently developed the calculus on a basis of heuristic rules and methods markedly deficient in logical justification. As is the case in many new developments, utility outweighed rigour, and, though Newton’s fluxions (or derivatives) and Leibniz’s infinitesimals (or differentials) lacked a coherent rational explanation, their power in answering heretofore unanswerable questions was undeniable. Unlike Newton, who made little effort to explain and justify fluxions, Leibniz, as an eminent and highly regarded philosopher, was influential in propagating the idea of infinitesimals, which he described as infinitely small actual numbers—that is, less than 1/n in absolute value for each positive integer n and yet not equal to zero. Berkeley, concerned over the deterministic and atheistic implications of philosophical mechanism, set out to reveal contradictions in the calculus in his influential book The Analyst; or, A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician. There he scathingly wrote about these fluxions and infinitesimals, “They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?” and further asked, “Whether mathematicians, who are so delicate in religious points, are strictly scrupulous in their own science? Whether they do not submit to authority, take things upon trust, and believe points inconceivable?”
Berkeley’s criticism was not fully met until the 19th century, when it was realized that, in the expression dy/dx, dx and dy need not lead an independent existence. Rather, this expression could be defined as the limit of ordinary ratios Δy/Δx, as Δx approaches zero without ever being zero. Moreover, the notion of limit was then explained quite rigorously, in answer to such thinkers as Zeno and Berkeley.
It was not until the middle of the 20th century that the logician Abraham Robinson (1918–74) showed that the notion of infinitesimal was in fact logically consistent and that, therefore, infinitesimals could be introduced as new kinds of numbers. This led to a novel way of presenting the calculus, called nonstandard analysis, which has, however, not become as widespread and influential as it might have.
Robinson’s argument was this: if the assumptions behind the existence of an infinitesimal ξ led to a contradiction, then this contradiction must already be obtainable from a finite set of these assumptions, say from:
But this finite set is consistent, as is seen by taking ξ = 1/(n + 1).
When Euclid presented his axiomatic treatment of geometry, one of his assumptions, his fifth postulate, appeared to be less obvious or fundamental than the others. As it is now conventionally formulated, it asserts that there is exactly one parallel to a given line through a given point. Attempts to derive this from Euclid’s other axioms did not succeed, and, at the beginning of the 19th century, it was realized that Euclid’s fifth postulate is, in fact, independent of the others. It was then seen that Euclid had described not the one true geometry but only one of a number of possible geometries.
Elliptic and hyperbolic geometries
Within the framework of Euclid’s other four postulates (and a few that he omitted), there were also possible elliptic and hyperbolic geometries. In plane elliptic geometry there are no parallels to a given line through a given point; it may be viewed as the geometry of a spherical surface on which antipodal points have been identified and all lines are great circles. This was not viewed as revolutionary. More exciting was plane hyperbolic geometry, developed independently by the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai (1802–60) and the Russian mathematician Nikolay Lobachevsky (1792–1856), in which there is more than one parallel to a given line through a given point. This geometry is more difficult to visualize, but a helpful model presents the hyperbolic plane as the interior of a circle, in which straight lines take the form of arcs of circles perpendicular to the circumference.
Another way to distinguish the three geometries is to look at the sum of the angles of a triangle. It is 180° in Euclidean geometry, as first reputedly discovered by Thales of Miletus (flourished 6th century bce), whereas it is more than 180° in elliptic geometry and less than 180° in hyperbolic geometry. See figure.
The discovery that there is more than one geometry was of foundational significance and contradicted the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant had argued that there is only one true geometry, Euclidean, which is known to be true a priori by an inner faculty (or intuition) of the mind. For Kant, and practically all other philosophers and mathematicians of his time, this belief in the unassailable truth of Euclidean geometry formed the foundation and justification for further explorations into the nature of reality. With the discovery of consistent non-Euclidean geometries, there was a subsequent loss of certainty and trust in this innate intuition, and this was fundamental in separating mathematics from a rigid adherence to an external sensory order (no longer vouchsafed as “true”) and led to the growing abstraction of mathematics as a self-contained universe. This divorce from geometric intuition added impetus to later efforts to rebuild assurance of truth on the basis of logic. (See below The quest for rigour.)
What then is the correct geometry for describing the space (actually space-time) we live in? It turns out to be none of the above, but a more general kind of geometry, as was first discovered by the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826–66). In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein showed, in the context of his general theory of relativity, that the true geometry of space is only approximately Euclidean. It is a form of Riemannian geometry in which space and time are linked in a four-dimensional manifold, and it is the curvature at each point that is responsible for the gravitational “force” at that point. Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to extend this idea to the electromagnetic force, hoping to reduce all physics to geometry, but a successful unified field theory eluded him.
In the 19th century, the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845–1918) returned once more to the notion of infinity and showed that, surprisingly, there is not just one kind of infinity but many kinds. In particular, while the set N of natural numbers and the set of all subsets of N are both infinite, the latter collection is more numerous, in a way that Cantor made precise, than the former. He proved that N, Z, and Q all have the same size, since it is possible to put them into one-to-one correspondence with one another, but that R is bigger, having the same size as the set of all subsets of N.
However, Cantor was unable to prove the so-called continuum hypothesis, which asserts that there is no set that is larger than N yet smaller than the set of its subsets. It was shown only in the 20th century, by Gödel and the American logician Paul Cohen (1934–2007), that the continuum hypothesis can be neither proved nor disproved from the usual axioms of set theory. Cantor had his detractors, most notably the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker (1823–91), who felt that Cantor’s theory was too metaphysical and that his methods were not sufficiently constructive (see below Nonconstructive arguments).