Character and object

DOI10.1017/S1755020315000398MaRDI QIDQ5737951zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Jeremy Avigad, Rebecca Morris

Publication date 31 May 2017

Published in The Review of Symbolic Logic (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.4832

zbMATH Keywords

\(L\)-seriesDirichlet charactersfunctions as objectsmethodologyontologyphilosophy of mathematicsprimes

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Philosophy of mathematics (00A30) History of mathematics in the 19th century (01A55) History of mathematical logic and foundations (03-03) Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations (03A05) Structure of proofs (03F07) History of number theory (11-03) (zeta (s)) and (L(s, chi)) (11M06) Multiple Dirichlet series and zeta functions and multizeta values (11M32) Primes in congruence classes (11N13) Ordinary representations and characters (20C15)

Abstract: In 1837, Dirichlet proved that there are infinitely many primes in any arithmetic progression in which the terms do not all share a common factor. Modern presentations of the proof are explicitly higher-order, in that they involve quantifying over and summing over Dirichlet characters, which are certain types of functions. The notion of a character is only implicit in Dirichlet's original proof, and the subsequent history shows a very gradual transition to the modern mode of presentation. In this essay, we describe an approach to the philosophy of mathematics in which it is an important task to understand the roles of our ontological posits and assess the extent to which they enable us to achieve our mathematical goals. We use the history of Dirichlet's theorem to understand some of the reasons that functions are treated as ordinary objects in contemporary mathematics, as well as some of the reasons one might want to resist such treatment. We also use these considerations to illuminate the formal treatment of functions and objects in Frege's logical foundation, and we argue that his philosophical and logical decisions were influenced by many of the same factors.

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Cites work

• Galois' theory of algebraic equations
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3843854 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 5505771 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1371568 (Why is no real title available?)
• The concept of ``character in Dirichlet's theorem on primes in an arithmetic progression
• The origin of the theory of group characters

Cited in

(5)

• The concept of ``character in Dirichlet's theorem on primes in an arithmetic progression
• Reliability of mathematical inference
• Plans and planning in mathematical proofs
• Motivated proofs: what they are, why they matter and how to write them
• Modularity in mathematics

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