May 17
Ken McAloon,
Brooklyn College
E Pluribus Unum
Athena sprang forth full grown from the head of Zeus. Newton/Leibniz created Calculus. Galois created Galois Theory. Cantor created Set Theory. Boole created Boolean Algebra.
But Models of Peano Arithmetic doesn’t have a dramatic origin myth like that and took some 100 years to emerge as a discipline in itself - from Dedekind’s Second Order Axioms for Arithmetic (1863), through Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879) and First Order Logic, through Godel’s Completeness and Incompleteness Theorems, through Skolem’s elegant construction of a non-standard model, through the War and après-guerre and on into the 1970s where the subject at last emerges as a discipline in itself. We’ll discuss the convergence of people and ideas from diverse fields like Model Theory, Set Theory, Recursion Theory, Proof Theory, Complexity Theory, … that led to the field we know and love today.