[FOM] Russell's influence

Richard Zach rzach at ucalgary.ca
Mon Oct 20 21:31:35 EDT 2003


> Its influence on the Hilbert school is less well
> known, since Hilbert's work in the Russellian tradition appeared
> only as unpublished lecture notes, but Wilfried Sieg, among
> others, has been doing detailed historical work on this
> little-known episode in Hilbert's career.  

The Hilbert school relied on mainly (indeed, almost exclusively until
the mid-1920s) two sources  : _Principia_ and Schroeder's _Algebra der
Logik_.  And Hilbert's way of doing logic, of course, had profound
influences.  _Grundzuege der theoretischen Logik_ (Hilbert & Ackermann)
and later on _Grundlagen der Mathematik_ (Hilbert & Bernays) were
standard textbooks until the 1950s; Goedel, e.g., got his logic from
_Grundzuege_.  Bernays gave a course on _Grundlagen_ at Princeton (with
Kleene et al in the audience) in 1935.

Paolo Mancosu has a couple of articles on Russell's influence on
Hilbert's school:

Between Russell and Hilbert: Behmann on the foundations of mathematics,
The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 5 (1999), no.3, pp. 303-330

The Russellian Influence on Hilbert and His School, to appear in:
Synthese 137 (2003).

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




More information about the FOM mailing list