Dedekind's analysis of number: Systems and axioms (Q813419)

The authors review the progress that Dedekind made in developing his foundations of arithmetic in the 1870s and 1880s by examining various manuscripts that survived in his Nachlass in Göttingen University Archives. They draw attention to Dedekind's concern with the roles of definitions and of abstraction, integers being confected by `acts of creation', the generality required of arithmetical laws, the importance of mappings, the place of `simple' infinitude (not the completed infinites of Cantor's theory), the role of mathematical induction, some nascent traces of model theory, and the hope to achieve consistency and completeness.