""Mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker, or the assumption of a special faculty of our understanding attuned to the principle of mathematical induction, as does Poincaré, or the primal intuition of Brouwer, or, finally, as do Russell and Whitehead, axioms of infinity, reducibility, or completeness, which in fact are actual, contentual assumptions that cannot be compensated for by consistency proofs."
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Quoted in Hilbert's Die Grundlagen der Mathematik (1927)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Hilbert
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David Hilbert
1862 – 1943
deutscher Mathematiker
46 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by David Hilbert →
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