"However, in all honesty, I must say that one must essentially forget that all proofs are transcribed in this formal language. In order to think productively, one must use all the intuitive and informal methods of reasoning at one's disposal. At the very end one must check that no errors have been committed; but in practice set theory is treated as any other branch of mathematics. The reason that we can do this is that we will never speak about proofs but only about models."
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Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesPeople from New JerseyMathematicians from the United StatesLogicians from the United States
Original Language: English
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p. 1078 of "The discovery of forcing." Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics 32, no. 4 (2002): 1071–1100.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Cohen
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Paul Cohen
Paul Joseph Cohen (April 2, 1934 – March 23, 2007) was an American mathematician and logician, best known for his proofs that the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are independent from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, for which he was awarded a Fields Medal.
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