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Hubert Kennedy Twelve Articles on Giuseppe Peano

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Hubert Kennedy Twelve Articles on Giuseppe Peano Hubert Kennedy Twelve Articles on Giuseppe Peano Peremptory Publications San Francisco 2002 1 © 2002 by Hubert Kennedy Twelve Articles on Giuseppe Peano is a Peremptory Publications ebook. It may be freely distributed, but no changes may be made in it. All but one of these articles originally appeared in various journals in the years 1963– 1984. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please write to [email protected]. 2 Contents Introduction 4 The Mathematical Philosophy of Giuseppe Peano 6 Philosophy of Science 30 (1963): 262–266 Giuseppe Peano at the University of Turin 14 The Mathematics Teacher 61 (1968): 703–706 Is there an elementary proof of Peano’s existence theorem for first order differential equations? 20 The American Mathematical Monthly 76 (1969): 1043–1045 The origins of modern axiomatics: Pasch to Peano 23 The American Mathematical Monthly 79 (1972): 133–136 What Russell learned from Peano 28 Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 14 (1973): 367–372 A prospective biography of Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) 35 Historia Mathematica 1 (1974): 87–89 Peano’s concept of number 39 Historia Mathematica 1 (1974): 387–408 Nine Letters from Giuseppe Peano to Bertrand Russell 68 Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (1975): 205–220 Contributi di Peano alla matematica 91 Nominazione. Collana-rivista internazionale di logica 1, no. 1 (1980): 21–26 Una lettera inedita di G. Peano sulla preparazione matematica dei suoi allievi 97 Archimede. Rivista per gli insegnanti e i cultori di matematiche pure e applicate 32 (1980): 56–58 Axiom of Choice 101 Notices of the American Mathematical Society 31 (1984): 284 Peano—the Unique 102 [1983] 3 Introduction For many years my research in the history of mathematics was focused on Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), the foremost Italian mathematician at the turn of the twentieth cen- tury. This culminated in the biography Peano: Life and Works of Giuseppe Peano (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), which I have re-published in a “definitive” edition as an ebook (2002). But there were a number of other shorter publications. Most of them are collected here. Not included are the 31-page booklet Giuseppe Peano, published by Birk- häuser Verlag Basel in their series “Kurze Mathematiker-Biographien,” which appeared in a German translation by Ruth Amsler in 1974, and—also in 1974—the entry “Giuseppe Peano” in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by C. C. Gillispie (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 10: 441–444. The latter will be in a collection of the seven articles I wrote for the DSB. The present articles appeared in a variety of journals and so are inevitably repeti- tious. The final article in this collection, written in 1983, appears here for the first time. It was written for a Festschrift in honor of Ludovico Geymonat (whose lectures Corrado Mangione and I attended together in 1957–58 at the University of Milan), but was re- jected by the editors, Corrado Mangione and Umberto Bottazzini, who spend a complete evening trying to pressure me into writing something else. The article reflects my recent enthusiasm for Max Stirner, which may be what they objected to. Two of the articles are in Italian. The first was written in English for translation into Italian. The second was originally written in Italian. For this ebook I have had to use various fonts and to manufacture several symbols that were not in the fonts available to me; this last was especially necessary for the article “Nine Letters from Giuseppe Peano to Bertrand Russell.” I was unable to make all of them fit as neatly on the line as they should—and some fonts do not convert well to the PDF format—but I hope their somewhat strange appearance will not make the formulas too difficult to read. Much of this material was, of course, used in the biography, but in the articles I was able to emphasize certain points. “Peano’s concept of number,” for example, goes into 4 great detail in one aspect of Peano’s thought. “Nine Letters from Giuseppe Peano to Ber- trand Russell” points up the historical importance of the contact between the two. All give evidence that Peano was one of the great mathematicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a figure well worth recalling. Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) 5 Philosophy of Science Vol. 30, No. 3, July 1963 THE MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY OF GIUSEPPE PEANO HUBERT C. KENNEDY Providence College Because Bertrand Russell adopted much of the logical symbolism of Peano, because Russell always had a high regard for the great Italian mathematician, and because Russell held the logicist thesis so strongly, many English-speaking mathematicians have been led to classify Peano as a logicist, or at least as a forerunner of the logicist school. An attempt is made here to deny this by showing that Peano’s primary interest was in axiomatics, that he never used the mathematical logic developed by him for the reduction of mathe- matical concepts to logical concepts, and that, instead, he denied the validity of such a re- duction. An attempt will be made in this brief note to partially answer the question: Did Peano have a philosophy of mathematics? This question is less easy to answer than one might think. On one hand, despite his evident interest in the philosophy of mathematics (shown by attendance at philosophical congresses, etc.) he showed extreme reserve and modesty when questioned about the subject; on the other hand, his express aim was not the development of a philosophy of mathematics, despite the obvious influence of his work on that subject. This influence is first seen in the group of Italian mathematicians who collaborated with him in the publication of the several editions of the Formulaire de mathématiques, among them his assistants at the University of Turin, F. Castellano, G. Vailati, and C. Burali-Forti. The last is remembered as the discoverer in 1897 of the first important antinomy in Cantor’s set theory [2], though the English-speaking mathemati- cians remained generally unaware of such a contradiction until B. Russell’s publication in 1903 of similar antinomies [21]. It is interesting to note that Russell’s own interest in this subject, an interest that consequently led, with the collaboration of A. N. Whitehead, to the publication of the famous Principia Mathematica, was aroused by Peano in 1897 at 6 the First International Congress of Mathematicians (Zurich), where the young Russell heard Peano present Section I from Tome II of the Formulaire de mathématiques (i.e. the part pertaining to mathematical logic.)1 Peano is perhaps best known for his Postulates for the Natural Numbers. These pos- tulates mark the completion of the process of “arithmetization” which began in the last century when H. Grassmann, in his Lehrbuch der Arithmetik (1861), showed that the commutative law can be derived from the associative law by means of the principle of complete induction. They may be stated: 1. Zero is a number. 2. The successor of any number is another number. 3. There are no two numbers with the same successor. 4. Zero is not the successor of a number. 5. Every property of zero, which belongs to the successor of every number with this property, belongs to all numbers. B. Russell objected that these postulates do not characterize the natural numbers. They characterize a much more general concept, that of a progression of any objects whatsoever which has a first member, contains no repetitions, and for each member of which there is an immediate successor. Peano made no reply to this “objection” and even advised his students to seriously consider it. Russell’s objection, however, had little force for Peano. R. Dedekind had said in his essay, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, of 1888, after defining an “ordered simply infinite system” to be a set of elements which, as we would now say, satisfies Peano’s postulates, that “if we entirely neglect the special character of the elements; simply retaining their distin- guishability and taking into account only the relations to one another in which they are placed ... then are these elements called natural numbers or ordinal numbers or simply 1 [Added in 2002] This statement is false. Russell first met Peano at the International Congress of Phi- losophy, Paris, 1900. 7 numbers. ... With reference to this freeing the elements from every other content (abstrac- tion) we are justified in calling numbers a free creation of the human mind” ([6], p. 68). Peano introduced his postulates in Arithmetices Principia, Nova Methodo Exposita (1889). He first read Dedekind’s essay as this little book was going to press. Indeed, he notes in the preface that he had found Dedekind’s essay useful and remarks that “in it, questions pertaining to the foundations of numbers are keenly examined.”2 We should note, however, that he arrived at the postulates independently of Dedekind, and that per- haps the “usefulness” was in finding “moral proof of the independence of the primitive propositions from which I started, in their substantial coincidence with the definitions of Dedekind” ([20], p. 243). Two years later, in “Sul concetto di numero” (1891), we find explicit recognition of the fact that the postulates do not characterize the natural numbers: “The propositions ex- press the necessary and sufficient conditions that the entities of a system can be made to correspond univocally to the series of natural numbers” ([18], p. 87). It seems, then, that Peano was aware from the beginning that the postulates do not characterize the natural numbers. They received their definitive statement in Formulaire de mathématiques, t. II, Sec. 2 (1898), where ‘one’ is replaced by ‘zero’ among the primitive notions, and where Peano remarks, in a note immediately following their statement: “These primitive propositions .
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