A Concise History of Mathematics for Philosophers

Download or read book A Concise History of Mathematics for Philosophers written by John Stillwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element aims to present an outline of mathematics and its history, with particular emphasis on events that shook up its philosophy. It ranges from the discovery of irrational numbers in ancient Greece to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discoveries on the nature of infinity and proof. Recurring themes are intuition and logic, meaning and existence, and the discrete and the continuous. These themes have evolved under the influence of new mathematical discoveries and the story of their evolution is, to a large extent, the story of philosophy of mathematics.