A Panorama of Pure Mathematics, As Seen by N. Bourbaki

This book challenges the views put forward by Pierre Cartier, one of the anchors of the famous Bourbaki group, and Cédric Villani, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who received the Fields Medal in 2010. Jean Dhombres, mathematician and science historian, and Gerhard Heinzmann, philosopher of science and also a specialist in mathematics engage in a fruitful dialogue with the two mathematicians, prompting readers to reflect on mathematical activity and its social consequences in history as well as in the modern world. Cédric Villani’s popular success proves once again that a common awareness has developed, albeit in a very confused way, of the major role of mathematics in the construction and efficiency of natural sciences, which are at the origin of our technologies. Despite this, the idea that mathematics cannot be shared remains firmly entrenched, a perceived failing that has even been branded a lack of culture by vocal forces in the media as well as cultural and political establishment. The authors explore three major directions in their dialogue: the highly complex relationship between mathematics and reality, the subject of many debates and opposing viewpoints; the freedom that the construction of mathematics has given humankind by enabling them to develop the natural sciences as well as mathematical research; and the responsibility with which the scientific community and governments should address the role of mathematics in research and education policies.

Galileo and Newton’s work towards the mathematisation of the physical world; Leibniz’s universal logical calculus; the Enlightenment’s mathématique sociale. John von Neumann inherited all these aims and philosophical intuitions, together with an idea that grew up around the Vienna Circle of an ethics in the form of an exact science capable of guiding individuals to make correct decisions. With the help of his boundless mathematical capacity, von Neumann developed a conception of the world as a mathematical game, a world globally governed by a universal logic in which individual consciousness moved following different strategies: his vision guided him from set theory to quantum mechanics, to economics and to his theory of automata (anticipating artificial intelligence and cognitive science). This book provides the first comprehensive scientific and intellectual biography of John von Neumann, a man who perhaps more than any other is representative of twentieth century science.

Practical Foundations collects the methods of construction of the objects of twentieth-century mathematics. Although it is mainly concerned with a framework essentially equivalent to intuitionistic Zermelo-Fraenkel logic, the book looks forward to more subtle bases in categorical type theory and the machine representation of mathematics. Each idea is illustrated by wide-ranging examples, and followed critically along its natural path, transcending disciplinary boundaries between universal algebra, type theory, category theory, set theory, sheaf theory, topology and programming. Students and teachers of computing, mathematics and philosophy will find this book both readable and of lasting value as a reference work.

This book is a reference for librarians, mathematicians, and statisticians involved in college and research level mathematics and statistics in the 21st century. We are in a time of transition in scholarly communications in mathematics, practices which have changed little for a hundred years are giving way to new modes of accessing information. Where journals, books, indexes and catalogs were once the physical representation of a good mathematics library, shelves have given way to computers, and users are often accessing information from remote places. Part I is a historical survey of the past 15 years tracking this huge transition in scholarly communications in mathematics. Part II of the book is the bibliography of resources recommended to support the disciplines of mathematics and statistics. These are grouped by type of material. Publication dates range from the 1800's onwards. Hundreds of electronic resources-some online, both dynamic and static, some in fixed media, are listed among the paper resources. Amazingly a majority of listed electronic resources are free.

As suggested by the title of this book, I will present a collection of coherently related applications and a theoretical development of a general systems theory. Hopefully, this book will invite all readers to sample an exciting and challenging (even fun!) piece of interdisciplinary research, that has characterized the scientific and technological achievements of the twentieth century. And, I hope that many of them will be motivated to do additional reading and to contribute to topics along the lines described in the following pages. Since the applications in this volume range through many scientific disciplines, from sociology to atomic physics, from Einstein’s relativity theory to Dirac’s quan tum mechanics, from optimization theory to unreasonable effectiveness of mathe matics to foundations of mathematical modeling, from general systems theory to Schwartz’s distributions, special care has been given to write each application in a language appropriate to that field. That is, mathematical symbols and abstractions are used at different levels so that readers in various fields will find it possible to read. Also, because of the wide range of applications, each chapter has been written so that, in general, there is no need to reference a different chapter in order to understand a specific application. At the same time, if a reader has the desire to go through the entire book without skipping any chapter, it is strongly suggested to refer back to Chapters 2 and 3 as often as possible.

While we are commonly told that the distinctive method of mathematics is rigorous proof, and that the special topic of mathematics is abstract structure, there has been no agreement among mathematicians, logicians, or philosophers as to just what either of these assertions means. John P. Burgess clarifies the nature of mathematical rigor and of mathematical structure, and above all of the relation between the two, taking into account some of the latest developments in mathematics, including the rise of experimental mathematics on the one hand and computerized formal proofs on the other hand. The main theses of Rigor and Structure are that the features of mathematical practice that a large group of philosophers of mathematics, the structuralists, have attributed to the peculiar nature of mathematical objects are better explained in a different way, as artefacts of the manner in which the ancient ideal of rigor is realized in modern mathematics. Notably, the mathematician must be very careful in deriving new results from the previous literature, but may remain largely indifferent to just how the results in the previous literature were obtained from first principles. Indeed, the working mathematician may remain largely indifferent to just what the first principles are supposed to be, and whether they are set-theoretic or category-theoretic or something else. Along the way to these conclusions, a great many historical developments in mathematics, philosophy, and logic are surveyed. Yet very little in the way of background knowledge on the part of the reader is presupposed.