Foundations of mathematics 

is the study of the philosophical and logical[1] and/or algorithmic basis

of mathematics, or, in a broader sense, the mathematical investigation of what underlies the
philosophical theories concerning the nature of mathematics.[2] In this latter sense, the distinction
between foundations of mathematics and philosophy of mathematics turns out to be quite vague.
Foundations of mathematics can be conceived as the study of the basic mathematical concepts (set,
function, geometrical figure, number, etc.) and how they form hierarchies of more complex structures
and concepts, especially the fundamentally important structures that form the language of
mathematics (formulas, theories and their models giving a meaning to formulas, definitions, proofs,
algorithms, etc.) also called metamathematical concepts, with an eye to the philosophical aspects
and the unity of mathematics. The search for foundations of mathematics is a central question of the
philosophy of mathematics; the abstract nature of mathematical objects presents special
philosophical challenges.
The foundations of mathematics as a whole does not aim to contain the foundations of every
mathematical topic. Generally, the foundations of a field of study refers to a more-or-less systematic
analysis of its most basic or fundamental concepts, its conceptual unity and its natural ordering or
hierarchy of concepts, which may help to connect it with the rest of human knowledge. The
development, emergence, and clarification of the foundations can come late in the history of a field,
and might not be viewed by everyone as its most interesting part.
Mathematics always played a special role in scientific thought, serving since ancient times as a
model of truth and rigor for rational inquiry, and giving tools or even a foundation for other sciences
(especially physics). Mathematics' many developments towards higher abstractions in the 19th
century brought new challenges and paradoxes, urging for a deeper and more systematic
examination of the nature and criteria of mathematical truth, as well as a unification of the diverse
branches of mathematics into a coherent whole.
The systematic search for the foundations of mathematics started at the end of the 19th century and
formed a new mathematical discipline called mathematical logic, which later had strong links
to theoretical computer science. It went through a series of crises with paradoxical results, until the
discoveries stabilized during the 20th century as a large and coherent body of mathematical
knowledge with several aspects or components (set theory, model theory, proof theory, etc.), whose
detailed properties and possible variants are still an active research field. Its high level of technical
sophistication inspired many philosophers to conjecture that it can serve as a model or pattern for
the foundations of other sciences.

Contents

 1Historical context

o 1.1Ancient Greek mathematics

o 1.2Platonism as a philosophy of mathematics

o 1.3Aristotelian realism

o 1.4Middle Ages and Renaissance

o 1.519th century

 1.5.1Real analysis
  1.5.2Group theory

 1.5.3Non-Euclidean geometries

 1.5.4Projective geometry

 1.5.5Boolean algebra and logic

 1.5.6Peano arithmetic

 2Foundational crisis

o 2.1Philosophical views

 2.1.1Formalism

 2.1.2Intuitionism

 2.1.3Logicism

 2.1.4Set-theoretic Platonism

 2.1.5Indispensability argument for realism

 2.1.6Rough-and-ready realism

 2.1.7Philosophical consequences of Gödel's completeness theorem

o 2.2More paradoxes

 3Toward resolution of the crisis

 4See also

 5Notes

 6References

 7External links

Historical context[edit]
See also: History of logic and History of mathematics

Ancient Greek mathematics[edit]

Further information: Ancient Greek mathematics

While the practice of mathematics had previously developed in other civilizations, special interest in
its theoretical and foundational aspects was clearly evident in the work of the Ancient Greeks.
Early Greek philosophers disputed as to which is more basic, arithmetic or geometry. Zeno of
Elea (490 – c. 430 BC) produced four paradoxes that seem to show the impossibility of change.
The Pythagorean school of mathematics originally insisted that only natural and rational numbers
exist. The discovery of the irrationality of √2, the ratio of the diagonal of a square to its side (around
5th century BC), was a shock to them which they only reluctantly accepted. The discrepancy
between rationals and reals was finally resolved by Eudoxus of Cnidus (408–355 BC), a student
of Plato, who reduced the comparison of two irrational ratios to comparisons of multiples of the
magnitudes involved. His method anticipated that of the Dedekind cut in the modern definition of real
numbers by Richard Dedekind (1831–1916).[3]
In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle (384–322 BC) laid down the axiomatic method for organizing a
field of knowledge logically by means of primitive concepts, axioms, postulates, definitions, and
theorems. Aristotle took a majority of his examples for this from arithmetic and from geometry. This
method reached its high point with Euclid's Elements (300 BC), a treatise on mathematics structured
with very high standards of rigor: Euclid justifies each proposition by a demonstration in the form of
chains of syllogisms (though they do not always conform strictly to Aristotelian templates). Aristotle's
syllogistic logic, together with the axiomatic method exemplified by Euclid's Elements, are
recognized as scientific achievements of ancient Greece.

Platonism as a philosophy of mathematics[edit]

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Further information: Platonism (mathematics)

Starting from the end of the 19th century, a Platonist view of mathematics became common among
practicing mathematicians.[citation needed]
The concepts or, as Platonists would have it, the objects of mathematics are abstract and remote
from everyday perceptual experience: geometrical figures are conceived as idealities to be
distinguished from effective drawings and shapes of objects, and numbers are not confused with the
counting of concrete objects. Their existence and nature present special philosophical challenges:
How do mathematical objects differ from their concrete representation? Are they located in their
representation, or in our minds, or somewhere else? How can we know them?
The ancient Greek philosophers took such questions very seriously. Indeed, many of their general
philosophical discussions were carried on with extensive reference to geometry and
arithmetic. Plato (424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) insisted that mathematical objects, like other
platonic Ideas (forms or essences), must be perfectly abstract and have a separate, non-material
kind of existence, in a world of mathematical objects independent of humans. He believed that the
truths about these objects also exist independently of the human mind, but is discovered by humans.
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.
Above the gateway to Plato's academy appeared a famous inscription: "Let no one who is ignorant
of geometry enter here". In this way Plato indicated his high opinion of geometry. He regarded
geometry as "the first essential in the training of philosophers", because of its abstract character.
This philosophy of Platonist mathematical realism is shared by many mathematicians.[citation needed] Some
authors argue that Platonism somehow comes as a necessary assumption underlying any
mathematical work.[4]
In this view, the laws of nature and the laws of mathematics have a similar status, and
the effectiveness ceases to be unreasonable. Not our axioms, but the very real world of
mathematical objects forms the foundation.
Aristotle dissected and rejected this view in his Metaphysics. These questions provide much fuel for
philosophical analysis and debate.

Aristotelian realism[edit]
Further information: Aristotelian realist philosophy of mathematics

Middle Ages and Renaissance[edit]

For over 2,000 years, Euclid's Elements stood as a perfectly solid foundation for mathematics, as its
methodology of rational exploration guided mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists well into the
19th century.
The Middle Ages saw a dispute over the ontological status of the universals (platonic
Ideas): Realism asserted their existence independently of perception; conceptualism asserted their
existence within the mind only; nominalism denied either, only seeing universals as names of
collections of individual objects (following older speculations that they are words, "logoi").
René Descartes published La Géométrie (1637), aimed at reducing geometry to algebra by means
of coordinate systems, giving algebra a more foundational role (while the Greeks used lengths to
define the numbers that are presently called real numbers). Descartes' book became famous after
1649 and paved the way to infinitesimal calculus.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) in England and Leibniz (1646–1716) in Germany independently
developed the infinitesimal calculus on a basis that required new foundations. In particular, Leibniz
described infinitesimals as numbers that are infinitely close to zero, a concept that does not fit in
previous foundational framework of mathematics, and was not formalized before the 20th century.
The strong implications of infinitesimal calculus on foundations of mathematics is illustrated by a
pamphlet of the Protestant philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), who wrote "[Infinitesimals]
are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the
ghosts of departed quantities?".[5] Leibniz also worked on logic but most of his writings on it remained
unpublished until 1903.
Then mathematics developed very rapidly and successfully in physical applications.

19th century[edit]
In the 19th century, mathematics became increasingly abstract. Concerns about logical gaps and
inconsistencies in different fields led to the development of axiomatic systems.
Real analysis[edit]
See also: Mathematical analysis §  History

Cauchy (1789–1857) started the project of formulating and proving the theorems of infinitesimal
calculus in a rigorous manner, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra exploited
by earlier authors. In his 1821 work Cours d'Analyse he defines infinitely small quantities in terms of
decreasing sequences that converge to 0, which he then used to define continuity. But he did not
formalize his notion of convergence.
The modern (ε, δ)-definition of limit and continuous functions was first developed by Bolzano in
1817, but remained relatively unknown. It gives a rigorous foundation of infinitesimal calculus based
on the set of real numbers, arguably resolving the Zeno paradoxes and Berkeley's arguments.
Mathematicians such as Karl Weierstrass (1815–1897) discovered pathological functions such
as continuous, nowhere-differentiable functions. Previous conceptions of a function as a rule for
computation, or a smooth graph, were no longer adequate. Weierstrass began to advocate
the arithmetization of analysis, to axiomatize analysis using properties of the natural numbers.
In 1858, Dedekind proposed a definition of the real numbers as cuts of rational numbers. This
reduction of real numbers and continuous functions in terms of rational numbers, and thus of natural
numbers, was later integrated by Cantor in his set theory, and axiomatized in terms of second order
arithmetic by Hilbert and Bernays.
Group theory[edit]
See also: History of group theory

For the first time, the limits of mathematics were explored. Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829), a
Norwegian, and Évariste Galois, (1811–1832) a Frenchman, investigated the solutions of various
polynomial equations, and proved that there is no general algebraic solution to equations of degree
greater than four (Abel–Ruffini theorem). With these concepts, Pierre Wantzel (1837) proved that
straightedge and compass alone cannot trisect an arbitrary angle nor double a cube. In
1882, Lindemann building on the work of Hermite showed that a straightedge and
compass quadrature of the circle (construction of a square equal in area to a given circle) was also
impossible by proving that π is a transcendental number. Mathematicians had attempted to solve all
of these problems in vain since the time of the ancient Greeks.
Abel and Galois's works opened the way for the developments of group theory (which would later be
used to study symmetry in physics and other fields), and abstract algebra. Concepts of vector
spaces emerged from the conception of barycentric coordinates by Möbius in 1827, to the modern
definition of vector spaces and linear maps by Peano in 1888. Geometry was no more limited to
three dimensions. These concepts did not generalize numbers but combined notions of functions
and sets which were not yet formalized, breaking away from familiar mathematical objects.
Non-Euclidean geometries[edit]
See also: Non-Euclidean geometry §  History

After many failed attempts to derive the parallel postulate from other axioms, the study of the still
hypothetical hyperbolic geometry by Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) led him to introduce
the hyperbolic functions and compute the area of a hyperbolic triangle (where the sum of angles is
less than 180°). Then the Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792–1856) established in
1826 (and published in 1829) the coherence of this geometry (thus the independence of the parallel
postulate), in parallel with the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai (1802–1860) in 1832, and
with Gauss. Later in the 19th century, the German mathematician Bernhard
Riemann developed Elliptic geometry, another non-Euclidean geometry where no parallel can be
found and the sum of angles in a triangle is more than 180°. It was proved consistent by defining
point to mean a pair of antipodal points on a fixed sphere and line to mean a great circle on the
sphere. At that time, the main method for proving the consistency of a set of axioms was to provide
a model for it.
Projective geometry[edit]
One of the traps in a deductive system is circular reasoning, a problem that seemed to
befall projective geometry until it was resolved by Karl von Staudt. As explained by Russian
historians:[6]
In the mid-nineteenth century there was an acrimonious controversy between the proponents of
synthetic and analytic methods in projective geometry, the two sides accusing each other of mixing
projective and metric concepts. Indeed the basic concept that is applied in the synthetic presentation
of projective geometry, the cross-ratio of four points of a line, was introduced through consideration
of the lengths of intervals.
The purely geometric approach of von Staudt was based on the complete quadrilateral to express
the relation of projective harmonic conjugates. Then he created a means of expressing the familiar
numeric properties with his Algebra of Throws. English language versions of this process of
deducing the properties of a field can be found in either the book by Oswald Veblen and John
Young, Projective Geometry (1938), or more recently in John Stillwell's Four Pillars of
Geometry (2005). Stillwell writes on page 120
... projective geometry is simpler than algebra in a certain sense, because we use only five
geometric axioms to derive the nine field axioms.
The algebra of throws is commonly seen as a feature of cross-ratios since students ordinarily rely
upon numbers without worry about their basis. However, cross-ratio calculations use metric features
of geometry, features not admitted by purists. For instance, in 1961 Coxeter wrote Introduction to
Geometry without mention of cross-ratio.
Boolean algebra and logic[edit]
Attempts of formal treatment of mathematics had started with Leibniz and Lambert (1728–1777), and
continued with works by algebraists such as George Peacock (1791–1858). Systematic
mathematical treatments of logic came with the British mathematician George Boole (1847) who
devised an algebra that soon evolved into what is now called Boolean algebra, in which the only
numbers were 0 and 1 and logical combinations (conjunction, disjunction, implication and negation)
are operations similar to the addition and multiplication of integers. Additionally, De
Morgan published his laws in 1847. Logic thus became a branch of mathematics. Boolean algebra is
the starting point of mathematical logic and has important applications in computer science.
Charles Sanders Peirce built upon the work of Boole to develop a logical system
for relations and quantifiers, which he published in several papers from 1870 to 1885.
The German mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) presented an independent development of
logic with quantifiers in his Begriffsschrift (formula language) published in 1879, a work generally
considered as marking a turning point in the history of logic. He exposed deficiencies in
Aristotle's Logic, and pointed out the three expected properties of a mathematical theory[citat