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Who were the American postulate theorists?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

Michael Scanlan
Michael Scanlan*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331
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Abstract

Articles by two American mathematicians, E. V. Huntington and Oswald Veblen, are discussed as examples of a movement in foundational research in the period 1900–1930 called American postulate theory. This movement also included E. H. Moore, R. L. Moore, C. H. Langford, H. M. Sheffer, C. J. Keyser, and others. The articles discussed exemplify American postulate theorists' standards for axiomatizations of mathematical theories, and their investigations of such axiomatizations with respect to metatheoretic properties such as independence, completeness, and consistency.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Symbolic Logic , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 981 - 1002
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1991

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Footnotes

1

I appreciate comments and corrections on a draft of this paper from William Aspray, John Corcoran, David McCarty, Gregory Moore, Woosuk Park, and George Weaver. I also appreciate a Travel to Collections grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which enabled me to consult the Veblen papers in the Library of Congress.

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