Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 1982 - Mathematics - 366 pages
This work stresses the illogical manner in which mathematics has developed, the question of applied mathematics as against 'pure' mathematics, and the challenges to the consistency of mathematics' logical structure that have occurred in the twentieth century.
 

Contents

The Thesis
3
The Genesis of Mathematical Truths
9
The Flowering of Mathematical Truths
31
The Mathematization of Science
50
The Withering of Truth
69
The Illogical Development of a Logical Subject
100
The Morass of Analysis
127
The Predicament circa 1800
153
Logicism versus Intuitionism
216
The Formalist and SetTheoretic Foundations
245
Disasters
258
The Isolation of Mathematics
278
Whither Mathematics?
307
The Authority of Nature
328
Selected Bibliography
355
Index
361

At the Gates of Paradise
172
A New Crisis of Reason
197

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1982)

Morris Kline is Professor Emeritus at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.

Bibliographic information