OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
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German mathematician Eduard Study (1862-1930) was an outspoken critic of several emerging trends in modern mathematics at the turn of the century. Intuitionism, he argued, was in the process of eliminating the very notion of truth at the core of any serious scientific endeavour, whereas axiom-obsessed formalists engaged in a mere game of symbols, thereby losing sight of what really grants meaning and value to mathematical concepts. In rejecting both approaches, Study sought to maintain that mathematics was a science formed of freely-created concepts yet still possessed a specific form of objectivity, whose exploration crucially relied on the careful construction of symbolic languages.
To disentangle these claims, this talk will delve into Study’s unpublished, philosophical essay on the foundations of analysis, and compare it to the mathematical practice espoused in his 1903 Geometrie der Dynamen, a landmark volume in the history of kinematics.
