Timeline for Cantor, set theory and foundations
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 22, 2023 at 11:39 | vote | accept | Alex | ||
| Aug 15, 2023 at 6:29 | comment | added | David Roberts | As late as the 1920s people considered general topology and measure theory as sub-topics of set theory. This is fairly clear in Hausdorff's foundational 1914 book on set theory en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundz%C3%BCge_der_Mengenlehre That ZFC and related systems became considered "the foundations" for all mathematics was not clear even when Gödel wrote about the relative consistency of CH and AC in the late 1930s, where the system of von Neumann/Bernays (now also named for Gödel) was adopted. As far as I understand it, vNBG was nearly standard until Cohen invented forcing. | |
| Aug 3, 2023 at 18:25 | comment | added | Conifold | Cantor did not think that mathematics needed foundations in the modern sense initiated by Frege and Hilbert. He was a classical platonist and saw it as 'founded' enough in something like objective platonic realm to be described, see Purkert. However, in his 1885 review of Frege's attempt at foundations he did write that it is "an inversion of what is correct" to ground cardinality on "concepts", as Frege attempted, see Ebert and Rossberg. | |
| Jul 25, 2023 at 22:18 | comment | added | combinatorist | I don't know the answer, but I suspect some of the other answers here might be a bit hasty. Cantor literally called his book the Grundlagen (foundation). Perhaps it meant something different in German, but it seems he was attempting to lay a pretty ambitious foundation. Maybe it was just for cardinality, and actually for "all of mathematics". | |
| Jul 25, 2023 at 13:49 | comment | added | DJohnson | Probably not. It took logicists such as Russell to make those connections. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox youtube.com/watch?v=ymGt7I4Yn3k | |
| Jul 25, 2023 at 13:19 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jul 25, 2023 at 8:30 | answer | added | Mikhail Katz | timeline score: 7 | |
| Jul 25, 2023 at 6:29 | comment | added | Mauro ALLEGRANZA | See this post: "foundational" issues were not the sources of Cantor's theory. And see also The Early Development of Set Theory:"set theory has generally been identified with the branch of math.logic that studies transfinite sets, originating in Cantor’s result that R has a greater cardinality than N. But set theory was both effect and cause of the rise of modern mathematics: the traces of this origin are indelibly stamped on its axiomatic structure." | |
| Jul 25, 2023 at 5:26 | history | edited | Alex | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 186 characters in body
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| Jul 25, 2023 at 5:18 | history | asked | Alex | CC BY-SA 4.0 |