The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. It aims to understand the nature and methods of mathematics, and find out the place of mathematics in people's lives. The logical and structural nature of mathematics makes this branch of philosophy broad and unique.
The philosophy of mathematics has two major themes: mathematical realism and mathematical anti-realism.
The origin of mathematics is of arguments and disagreements. Whether the birth of mathematics was by chance or induced by necessity during the development of similar subjects, such as physics, remains an area of contention.
Many thinkers have contributed their ideas concerning the nature of mathematics. Today, some philosophers of mathematics aim to give accounts of this form of inquiry and its products as they stand, while others emphasize a role for themselves that goes beyond simple interpretation to critical analysis. There are traditions of mathematical philosophy in both Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy. Western philosophies of mathematics go as far back as Pythagoras, who described the theory "everything is mathematics" (mathematicism), Plato, who paraphrased Pythagoras, and studied the ontological status of mathematical objects, and Aristotle, who studied logic and issues related to infinity (actual versus potential).
Greek philosophy on mathematics was strongly influenced by their study of geometry. For example, at one time, the Greeks held the opinion that 1 (one) was not a number, but rather a unit of arbitrary length. A number was defined as a multitude. Therefore, 3, for example, represented a certain multitude of units, and was thus "truly" a number. At another point, a similar argument was made that 2 was not a number but a fundamental notion of a pair. These views come from the heavily geometric straight-edge-and-compass viewpoint of the Greeks: just as lines drawn in a geometric problem are measured in proportion to the first arbitrarily drawn line, so too are the numbers on a number line measured in proportion to the arbitrary first "number" or "one".
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
This course provides an overview of key advances in continuous optimization and statistical analysis for machine learning. We review recent learning formulations and models as well as their guarantees
Multivariate statistics focusses on inferring the joint distributional properties of several random variables, seen as random vectors, with a main focus on uncovering their underlying dependence struc
Discrete mathematics is a discipline with applications to almost all areas of study. It provides a set of indispensable tools to computer science in particular. This course reviews (familiar) topics a
Foundations of mathematics is the study of the philosophical and logical 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. In this latter sense, the distinction between foundations of mathematics and philosophy of mathematics turns out to be vague. Foundations of mathematics can be conceived as the study of the basic mathematical concepts (set, function, geometrical figure, number, etc.
In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality. That is, logic and mathematics are not considered analytic activities wherein deep properties of objective reality are revealed and applied, but are instead considered the application of internally consistent methods used to realize more complex mental constructs, regardless of their possible independent existence in an objective reality.
Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (hereinafter WMCF) is a book by George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, and Rafael E. Núñez, a psychologist. Published in 2000, WMCF seeks to found a cognitive science of mathematics, a theory of embodied mathematics based on conceptual metaphor.
Arterial pulse waves (PWs) such as blood pressure and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals contain a wealth of information on the cardiovascular (CV) system that can be exploited to assess vascular age and identify individuals at elevated CV risk. We review th ...
Motivated by the transfer of proofs between proof systems, and in particular from first order automated theorem provers (ATPs) to interactive theorem provers (ITPs), we specify an extension of the TPTP derivation text format to describe proofs in first-ord ...
2024
This thesis concerns the theory of positive-definite completions and its mutually beneficial connections to the statistics of function-valued or continuously-indexed random processes, better known as functional data analysis. In particular, it dwells upon ...