A non-standard analysis of a cultural icon: the case of Paul Halmos

Abstract: We examine Paul Halmos' comments on category theory, Dedekind cuts, devil worship, logic, and Robinson's infinitesimals. Halmos' scepticism about category theory derives from his philosophical position of naive set-theoretic realism. In the words of an MAA biography, Halmos thought that mathematics is "certainty" and "architecture" yet 20th century logic teaches us is that mathematics is full of uncertainty or more precisely incompleteness. If the term architecture meant to imply that mathematics is one great solid castle, then modern logic tends to teach us the opposite lession, namely that the castle is floating in midair. Halmos' realism tends to color his judgment of purely scientific aspects of logic and the way it is practiced and applied. He often expressed distaste for nonstandard models, and made a sustained effort to eliminate first-order logic, the logicians' concept of interpretation, and the syntactic vs semantic distinction. He felt that these were vague, and sought to replace them all by his polyadic algebra. Halmos claimed that Robinson's framework is "unnecessary" but Henson and Keisler argue that Robinson's framework allows one to dig deeper into set-theoretic resources than is common in Archimedean mathematics. This can potentially prove theorems not accessible by standard methods, undermining Halmos' criticisms. Keywords: Archimedean axiom; bridge between discrete and continuous mathematics; hyperreals; incomparable quantities; indispensability; infinity; mathematical realism; Robinson.

Review text

Paul Halmos not only was a great mathematician but also a decidedly commentator on certain mathematical things. It is known that in his `automathography' [I want to be a mathematician. An automathography. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag (1985; Zbl 0668.01018)] he rejected, for example, Dedekind cuts as well as nonstandard analysis. The authors of the paper under review examine Halmos' comments on category theory, Dedekind cuts, logic, nonstandard infinitesimals, and other things and conclude that Halmos saw mathematics as something certain, while 20th-century logic teaches us that mathematics is full of uncertainty or incompleteness. Halmos' opinions are compared with what his pupil Errett Bishop did when he opposed classical mathematics as a whole.

Recommendations

Cites work

Cited in

(5)

This page was built for publication: A non-standard analysis of a cultural icon: the case of Paul Halmos

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q528518)