[FOM] CATEGORICITY and STRONGLY MINIMAL SETS

[Richard Zach]

> >The study of categoricity dates (at least) from the work of
> >Huntington around the turn of the 20th century.
> 
> Who is Huntington, and what did he do at that surprisingly early date?

Edward Huntington (1874-1952) was Harvard mathematician and one of the
so-called American Postulate Theorists (Huntington, O. Veblen, C. H.
Langford, H. M. Sheffer and others)

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Huntington.html

Huntington was the first (?) to define the notion of categoricity for an
axiomatic system -- he called it "sufficiency" -- in 1902. 

The historical development of the notions of completeness and
categoricity from Dedekind to Carnap is discussed in Reck, E. and S.
Awodey, Completeness and categoricity. Part I. History & Philosophy of
Logic vol. 23 (2002) 1-30

See also Michael Scanlan, Who were the American Postulate Theorists?
Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 56 (1991), 981-1002.

-R

-- 
Richard Zach ...... http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/
Assistant  Professor,   Department  of  Philosophy
University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada