Category Archives: Philosophy of Mathematics

This category could also be a subcategory of Philosophy

The Society of Mathematics 2

January 24, 2022 – 8:19 am

This post is a response by Alexandre Borovik to my previous post. The following words then are Sasha’s:

Dear David,

I joined the AMR. In my view, its areas of activities are sufficiently clearly defined [on its homepage]:

The AMR has several initiatives under development. These include:

  • AMR colloquia, lectures and workshops, exploring new ways to present research
  • Updates and reviews of new research
  • Reviews of classic influential papers
  • Discussions of open problems
  • Video expositions of mathematical research
  • AMR journals and publications leveraging new technological opportunities
  • Interviews of mathematicians
  • Developing new ideas for the flourishing of the international mathematical research community

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Mathematics | Tagged | Comments (1)

The Society of Mathematics

January 22, 2022 – 2:00 pm

Mannequin in front of summation formula

This post concerns the Association for Mathematical Research, or AMR. A number of people are upset by its existence. I am not exactly one of them, but am suspicious, mainly because I do not know why a new organization would be needed, when we already have

The Twitter account of the AMR is dated to April, 2021. The website of the AMR supplies a list of founding members, but no account of when, how, or why they became founders. The site has a brief mission statement:

THE MISSION of the AMR is to SUPPORT MATHEMATICAL RESEARCH and SCHOLARSHIP

Are those other organizations not doing a good job? Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Mathematics, Principles of Art | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Feminist Epistemology

January 29, 2021 – 6:47 am

To this post, I am adding this introduction in July 2021. I have returned to some of the ideas of the post, and I see that I left them in a jumble. They may still be that, but I am trying to straighten up a bit.

Beyond this introduction, the post has three parts. Part III takes up more than half of the whole post and consists of my notes on

  1. Elizabeth Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 13, 2020. 61 pages.

In Anderson’s article I see – as I note below – ideas that are familiar, thanks to my previous reading of philosophers such as Robin George Collingwood, Mary Midgley, and Robert Pirsig. Henry David Thoreau may not exactly be one of those philosophers, but he is somehow why I came to write this post in the first place.

Here is a table of contents for the whole post:

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in “ceases to be a mind”, Collingwood, Descartes, Midgley, Philosophy, Principles of Art, Sex and Gender | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (6)

Pacifism

October 29, 2020 – 9:18 am

Pacifism is properly pacificism, the making of peace: not a belief or an attitude, but a practice. Mathematics then is pacifist, because learning it means learning that you cannot fight your way to the truth. Might does not make right. If others are going to agree with you, they will have to do it freely. Moreover, you cannot rest until they do agree with you, if you’ve got a piece of mathematics that you think is right; for you could be wrong, if others don’t agree.

The book *Dorothy Healey Remembers,* with photo of subject

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, dialectic, Freedom, Harper’s, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Pacifism, Philosophy | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Mathematics and Logic

October 13, 2020 – 8:55 am

Large parts of this post are taken up with two subjects:

  1. The notion (due to Collingwood) of criteriological sciences, logic being one of them.

  2. Gödel’s theorems of completeness and incompleteness, as examples of results in the science of logic.

Like the most recent in the current spate of mathematics posts, the present one has arisen from material originally drafted for the first post in this series.

In that post, I defined mathematics as the science whose findings are proved by deduction. This definition does not say what mathematics is about. We can say however what logic is about: it is about mathematics quâ deduction, and more generally about reasoning as such. This makes logic a criteriological science, because logic seeks, examines, clarifies and limits the criteria whereby we can make deductions. As examples of this activity, Gödel’s theorems are, in a crude sense to be refined below, that

  • everything true in all possible mathematical worlds can be deduced;

  • some things true in the world of numbers can never be deduced;

  • the latter theorem is one of those things.

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Education, Euclid, Logic, Mathematics, Plato | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Multiplicity of Mathematics

October 8, 2020 – 5:54 am

I continue with the recent posts about mathematics, which so far have been as follows.

  1. “What Mathematics Is”: As distinct from the natural sciences, mathematics is the science whose findings are proved by deduction. I say this myself, and I find it at least implicit in an address by Euphemia Lofton Haynes.

  2. “More of What It Is”: Some mathematicians do not distinguish mathematics from physics.

  3. “Knottedness”: Topologically speaking, there is a sphere whose outside is not that of a sphere. The example is Alexander’s Horned Sphere, but it cannot actually be physically constructed.

  4. “Why It Works”: Why there can be such a thing as the horned sphere.

When I first drafted the first post above, I said a lot more than I eventually posted. I saved it for later, and later is starting to come now.

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Education, Euclid, Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

More of What It Is

September 21, 2020 – 7:08 pm

I say that mathematics is the deductive science; and yet there would seem to be mathematicians who disagree. I take up two cases here.

From Archimedes, De Planorum Aequilibriis,
in Heiberg’s edition (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881)

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Archimedes, Calculus, Collingwood, Euclid, Mathematics, Philosophy | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

What Mathematics Is

September 15, 2020 – 9:13 am

Mathematics “has no generally accepted definition,” according to Wikipedia today. Two references are given for the assertion. I suggest that what really has no generally accepted definition is the subject of mathematics: the object of study, what mathematics is about. Mathematics itself can be defined by its method. As Wikipedia currently says also,

it has become customary to view mathematical research as establishing truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions.

I would put it more simply. Mathematics is the science whose findings are proved by deduction.

A 7×7 grid of squares, divided into four 3×4 rectangles arranged symmetrically about one square; the rectangles are divided in two by diagonals, which themselves describe a square

That is my definition. It has only the word “science” in common with a dictionary definition:

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Mathematics, Philosophy, Sex and Gender | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Salvation

February 24, 2020 – 7:06 am

Because Herman Wouk was going to put physicists in a novel, Richard Feynman advised him to learn calculus: “It’s the language God talks.” I think I know what Feynman meant. Calculus is the means by which we express the laws of the physical universe. This is the universe that, according to the mythology, God brought into existence with such commands as, “Let there be light.” Calculus has allowed us to refine those words of creation from the Biblical account. Credited as a discover of calculus, as well as of physical laws, Isaac Newton was given an epitaph (ultimately not used) by Alexander Pope:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

I don’t know, but maybe Steven Strogatz quotes Pope’s words in his 2019 book, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe. This is where I found out about Wouk’s visit with Feynman. I saw the book recently (Saturday, February 22, 2020) in Pandora Kitabevi here in Istanbul. I looked in the book for a certain topic that was of interest to me, but did not find it; then I found a serious misunderstanding.

book cover: Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Archimedes, Calculus, Euclid, Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Anthropology of Mathematics

October 13, 2019 – 6:05 pm

This essay was long when originally published; now, on November 30, 2019, I have made it longer, in an attempt to clarify some points.

The essay begins with two brief quotations, from Collingwood and Pirsig respectively, about what it takes to know people.

  • The Pirsig quote is from Lila, which is somewhat interesting as a novel, but naive about metaphysics; it might have benefited from an understanding of Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics.

  • A recent article by Ray Monk in Prospect seems to justify my interest in Collingwood; eventually I have a look at the article.

Ideas that come up along the way include the following.

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, “ceases to be a mind”, dialectic, Homer, Mathematics, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Plato, question and answer, T. S. Eliot, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (14)