"Mathematics and logic, historically speaking, have been entirely distinct studies. Mathematics has been connected with science, logic with Greek. But both have developed in modern times: logic has become more mathematical and mathematics has become more logical. The consequence is that it has now become wholly impossible to draw a line between the two; in fact, the two are one. They differ as boy and man: logic is the youth of mathematics and mathematics is the manhood of logic. This view is resented by logicians who, having spent their time in the study of classical texts, are incapable of following a piece of symbolic reasoning, and by mathematicians who have learnt a technique without troubling to inquire into its meaning or justification. Both types are now fortunately growing rarer. So much of modern mathematical work is obviously on the border-line of logic, so much of modern logic is symbolic and formal, that the very close relationship of logic and mathematics has become obvious to every instructed student. The proof of their identity is, of course, a matter of detail: starting with premises which would be universally admitted to belong to logic, and arriving by deduction at results which as obviously belong to mathematics, we find that there is no point at which a sharp line can be drawn, with logic to the left and mathematics to the right. If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point, in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica, they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer must be quite arbitrary."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) pp.194–195.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Unification_in_science_and_mathematics
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Unification in science and mathematics
99 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Unification in science and mathematics →
Related Quotes
"It appears... that the elastic theories of light, if Kelvin's gyrostatic adynamic ether be admitted, have not been wh…"
"At first the mathematical disciplines were not sharply defined. As knowledge increased, individual subjects split off…"
"Whatever its source, mathematics has come down to the present by the two main streams of number and form. The first c…"
"If the early Greeks were cognizant of Babylonian algebra, they made no attempt to develop or even to use it, and ther…"
"Science is an attempt to represent the known world as a closed system with a perfect formalism. Scientific discovery …"
"Up to this point mathematics alone appeared to Descartes worthy of being called a science. ...in order to establish t…"
"[A]s the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in the same measure sublime... w…"
"Edmund Burke, ' (1757) p. 81 of the 1898 edition."
"Copernicus had taken one course in treating the earth as virtually a celestial body in the Aristotelian sense—a perfe…"
"The more man inquires into the laws which regulate the material universe, the more he is convinced that all its varie…"