This paper explores the set theoretic assumptions used in the current published proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, how these assumptions figure in the methods Wiles uses, and the currently known prospects for a proof using weaker assumptions.

The view that toposes originated as generalized set theory is a figment of set theoretically educated common sense. This false history obstructs understanding of category theory and especially of categorical foundations for mathematics. Problems in geometry, topology, and related algebra led to categories and toposes. Elementary toposes arose when Lawvere's interest in the foundations of physics and Tierney's in the foundations of topology led both to study Grothendieck's foundations for algebraic geometry. I end with remarks on a categorical view of (...) the history of set theory, including a false history plausible from that point of view that would make it helpful to introduce toposes as a generalization from set theory. (shrink)

Now available in paperback, this acclaimed book introduces categories and elementary toposes in a manner requiring little mathematical background. It defines the key concepts and gives complete elementary proofs of theorems, including the fundamental theorem of toposes and the sheafification theorem. It ends with topos theoretic descriptions of sets, of basic differential geometry, and of recursive analysis.

Elementary axioms describe a category of categories. Theorems of category theory follow, including some on adjunctions and triples. A new result is that associativity of composition in categories follows from cartesian closedness of the category of categories. The axioms plus an axiom of infinity are consistent iff the axioms for a well-pointed topos with separation axiom and natural numbers are. The theory is not finitely axiomatizable. Each axiom is independent of the others. Further independence and definability results are proved. Relations (...) between categories and sets, the latter defined as discrete categories, are described, and applications to foundations are discussed. (shrink)

Glaucon in Plato's _Republic_ fails to grasp intermediates. He confuses pursuing a goal with achieving it, and so he adopts ‘mathematical platonism’. He says mathematical objects are eternal. Socrates urges a seriously debatable, and seriously defensible, alternative centered on the destruction of hypotheses. He offers his version of geometry and astronomy as refuting the charge that he impiously ‘ponders things up in the sky and investigates things under the earth and makes the weaker argument the stronger’. We relate his account (...) briefly to mathematical developments by Plato's associates Theaetetus and Eudoxus, and then to the past 200 years' developments in geometry. (shrink)

While Saunders Mac Lane studied for his D.Phil in Göttingen, he heard David Hilbert's weekly lectures on philosophy, talked philosophy with Hermann Weyl, and studied it with Moritz Geiger. Their philosophies and Emmy Noether's algebra all influenced his conception of category theory, which has become the working structure theory of mathematics. His practice has constantly affirmed that a proper large-scale organization for mathematics is the most efficient path to valuable specific results—while he sees that the question of which results are (...) valuable has an ineliminable philosophic aspect. His philosophy relies on the ideas of truth and existence he studied in Göttingen. His career is a case study relating naturalism in philosophy of mathematics to philosophy as it naturally arises in mathematics. Introduction Structures and Morphisms Varieties of Structuralism Göttingen Logic: Mac Lane's Dissertation Emmy Noether Natural Transformations Grothendieck: Toposes and Universes Lawvere and Foundations Truth and Existence Naturalism Austere Forms of Beauty. (shrink)

We can learn from questions as well as from their answers. This paper urges some things to learn from questions about categorical foundations for mathematics raised by Geoffrey Hellman and from ones he invokes from Solomon Feferman.

often insisted existence in mathematics means logical consistency, and formal logic is the sole guarantor of rigor. The paper joins this to his view of intuition and his own mathematics. It looks at predicativity and the infinite, Poincaré's early endorsement of the axiom of choice, and Cantor's set theory versus Zermelo's axioms. Poincaré discussed constructivism sympathetically only once, a few months before his death, and conspicuously avoided committing himself. We end with Poincaré on Couturat, Russell, and Hilbert.

The large-structure tools of cohomology including toposes and derived categories stay close to arithmetic in practice, yet published foundations for them go beyond ZFC in logical strength. We reduce the gap by founding all the theorems of Grothendieck’s SGA, plus derived categories, at the level of Finite-Order Arithmetic, far below ZFC. This is the weakest possible foundation for the large-structure tools because one elementary topos of sets with infinity is already this strong.

The article looks briefly at Fefermans own foundations. Among many different senses of foundations, the one that mathematics needs in practice is a recognized body of truths adequate to organize definitions and proofs. Finding concise principles of this kind has been a huge achievement by mathematicians and logicians. We put ZFC and categorical foundations both into this context.

This note argues against Barwise and Etchemendy's claim that their semantics for self-reference requires use of Aczel's anti-foundational set theory, AFA, semantics for self-reference requires use of Aczel's anti-foundational set theory, AFA, ones irrelevant to the task at hand" (The Liar, p. 35). Switching from ZF to AFA neither adds nor precludes any isomorphism types of sets. So it makes no difference to ordinary mathematics. I argue against the author's claim that a certain kind of 'naturalness' nevertheless makes AFA preferable (...) to ZF for their purposes. I cast their semantics in a natural, isomorphism invariant form with self-reference as a fixed point property for propositional operators. Independent of the particulars of any set theory, this form is somewhat simpler than theirs and easier to adapt to other theories of self-reference. (shrink)

The article surveys some past and present debates within mathematics over the meaning of category theory. It argues that such conceptual analyses, applied to a field still under active development, must be in large part either predictions of, or calls for, certain programs of further work.

This book is important for philosophy of mathematics and for the study of French philosophy. French philosophers are more concerned than most Anglo-American with mathematical practice outside of foundations. This contradicts the fashionable claim that French intellectuals get science all wrong and we return below to a germane example from Sokal and Bricmont [1999]. The emphasis on practice goes back to mid-20th century French historians of science including those Kuhn cites as sources for his orientation in philosophy of science [Kuhn (...) 1996: p. viii]. And the French often look to the experience, rather than the ideology, of Bourbaki. (shrink)

This note describes Saunders Mac Lane as a philosopher, and indeed as a paragon naturalist philosopher. He approaches philosophy as a mathematician. But, more than that, he learned philosophy from David Hilbert’s lectures on it, and by discussing it with Hermann Weyl, as much as he did by studying it with the mathematically informed Göttingen Philosophy professor Moritz Geiger.

Systems of differential equations are used to describe, model, explain, and predict states of physical systems. Experimental and theoretical branches of physics including general relativity, climate science, and particle physics have differential equations at their center. Direct solutions to differential equations are not available in many domains, which spurs on the use of creative mathematics and simulated solutions.

Emmy Noether’s many articles around the time that Felix Klein and David Hilbert were arranging her invitation to Göttingen include a short but brilliant note on invariants of finite groups highlighting her creativity and perspicacity in algebra. Contrary to the idea that Noether abandoned Paul Gordan’s style of mathematics for Hilbert’s, this note shows her combining them in a way she continued throughout her mature abstract algebra.

We are used to seeing foundations linked to the mainstream mathematics of the late nineteenth century: the arithmetization of analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and the rise of abstract structures in algebra. And a growing number of case studies bring a more philosophy-of-science viewpoint to the latest mathematics, as in [Carter, 2005; Corfield, 2006; Krieger, 2003; Leng, 2002]. Mac Lane's autobiography is a valuable bridge between these, recounting his experience of how the mid- and late-twentieth-century mainstream grew especially through Hilbert's school.An autobiography (...) at age 94 obviously has a lot of ground to cover. Mac Lane entered Yale in 1926 to study chemistry as a good practical career field but by the end of his first year he had won a $50 prize in mathematics and learned that you could make a living with it—as an actuary. He decided to do that. The next year he was excited to learn from his philosophy professor F.S.C. Northrop that you can also pursue new mathematical discoveries! Northrop had studied with A.N. Whitehead and sold Mac Lane on the excitement of Principia Mathematica. In a pattern that foreshadowed his career Mac Lane bought and annotated a copy of the first volume of Principia but his planned tutorial study of the book turned into a study of [Hausdorff, 1914] applying set theory to topology and analysis. As a graduate student at Chicago he was powerfully influenced by E.H. Moore, who taught the new axiomatic methods as tools for unifying and advancing the most classical analysis . Then he went to Göttingen. He heard Hilbert lecture on philosophy. He studied mathematics and its philosophy with Weyl. He followed Noether's lectures on abstract algebra for number theory. He had gone there to study logic and he wrote a …. (shrink)

The creation of algebraic topology required “all the energy and the temperament of Emmy Noether” according to topologists Paul Alexandroff and Heinz Hopf. Alexandroff stressed Noether's radical pro-Russian politics, which her colleagues found in “poor taste”; yet he found “a bright trait of character.” She joined the Independent Social Democrats in 1919. They were tiny in Göttingen until that year when their vote soared as they called for a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Minister of the Army and many Göttingen (...) students called them Bolshevist terrorists. Noether's colleague Richard Courant criticized USPD radicalism. Her colleague Hermann Weyl downplayed her radicalism and that view remains influential but the evidence favors Alexandroff. Weyl was ambivalent in parallel ways about her mathematics and her politics. He deeply admired her yet he found her abstractness and her politics excessive and even dangerous. (shrink)

Topology uses simple geometric and algebraic ideas, but its huge success and vast ramifications make it a tough nut for historians of twentieth‐century mathematics. Two books have addressed it well: Dieudonné chronicles about one thousand key definitions and theorems, and essays in James focus on forty central themes. Both assume considerable mathematics, but neither offers a historical synthesis of the simplest core ideas. Now, Alain Herreman uses semiotics to watch these leading ideas develop through the founding works of Henri Poincaré, (...) Oswald Veblen, James Alexander, and Solomon Lefschetz. Herreman states outright that semiotics will not exhaust these meanings, but he makes it a revealing tool.The method is especially suited to Poincaré, who will define one technical term repeatedly in a single work, each time differently, as if it was the first, and perhaps no definition will match any use of the term in proofs. For Poincaré no term gets meaning from a definition. Each functions in relation to the others—that is, specifically in relation to other terms in Poincaré's work. It is no use invoking standards of rigor current in Poincaré's time and place or then‐current definitions. Poincaré was well known at the time for using neither: Poincaré's meanings must be derived from his writing, as Herreman does.Herreman bases his semiotics on Hjelmslev yet refutes Hjelmslev's concern that mathematics may be “monoplanar,” with no content beyond the signs themselves . The book depicts four levels of content at work in these authors: algebraic, geometric, arithmetic, and set theoretic. Herreman says a sign has algebraic content if its use depends on its written expression, the way polynomials are formal expressions added and multiplied by formal rules. Early topologists—here especially Alexander—sought purely combinatorial methods. Thus a “cube” is a set of six “faces,” twelve “edges,” and eight “vertices,” each taken as primitive and described only by a short table showing which ones meet which. Combinatorics typifies arithmetic content for Herreman. Yet a cube is also an infinite set of points. Herreman speaks of geometric content when a sign indicates both a set of parts and a set of points. Today we might use different notations for the set of points and the set of parts—Poincaré et al. did not. Herreman will not reconstruct their works or restate them in other words; rather, he uses these levels of content to organize extensive quotations and analyze the relations in each text as they move toward deeper union of the algebraic and geometric.The chapter on Lefschetz makes a great finale. Lefschetz is arguably Poincaré's closest and greatest student, though the two never met. Like Poincaré's, his work is at once compelling and baffling, decisive for the future of mathematics yet brutally difficult to absorb. Semiotics serves well in presenting this mathematician who “never stated a false theorem or gave a correct proof,” as his friends joked.The book does not go far into theorems. Yet it requires some background. A beginner might enjoy it with Alexandroff , a gem itself, written with unusually strong historic sense. Specialists will enjoy reading it with the original works for its fresh viewpoints and novel connections. It is a fine way to analyze the works, to see how they create their own meanings. (shrink)

Alexandre Grothendieck foi um dos maiores matemáticos do século 20 e um dos mais atípicos. Nascido na Alemanha a um pai anarquista de origem russa, sua infância foi marcada pela militância política dos seus pais, assim passando por revoluções, guerras e sobrevivência. Descoberto por sua precocidade matemática por Henri Cartan, Grothendieck fez seu doutorado sob orientação de Laurent Schwartz e Jean Dieudonné. As principais contribuições dele são na área da topologia e na geometria algébrica, assim como na teoria das categorias. (...) No final dos anos de 1960, ele se dedicou à militância política e ecológica, organizando a revista Survivre durante três anos. Em 1986, publicou um manuscrito autobiográfico de 1000 páginas, Récoltes et semailles, em que ele descreve sua experiência e sua prática da matemática, assim suas contribuições à comunidade matemática francesa. Pouco comentado na filosofia, as implicações dos seus descobrimentos fora mais recentemente discutidas por Alain Badiou na sua "fenômeno-lógica", em Logiques des mondes e Arkady Plonitsky, Mathgematics, Science and postclassical Theory, pesquisa trata da semelhança entre os aspectos formais da filosofia de Gilles Deleuze e da topologia de Grothendieck. (shrink)