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Giuseppe Peano Quotes

No number before zero. The numbers may go on forever, but like the cosmos, they have a beginning.

No number before zero. The numbers may go on forever, but like the cosmos, they have a beginning.

Giuseppe Peano
Zero, Numbers, Forever

Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use.

Giuseppe Peano
Philosophy, Science, Foundation
"The Principles of Arithmetic, presented by a new method". Book by Giuseppe Peano, 1889.

In every science, after having analysed the ideas, expressing the more complicated by means of the more simple, one finds a certain number that cannot be reduced among them, and that one can define no further. These are the primitive ideas of the science; it is necessary to acquire them through experience, or through induction; it is impossible to explain them by deduction.

Giuseppe Peano
Mean, Simple, Ideas
"The Mathematical Philosophy of Giuseppe Peano". Philosophy of Science Vol. 30, No. 3, July 1963.

1. 0 is a number. 2. The immediate successor of a number is also a number. 3. 0 is not the immediate successor of any number. 4. No two numbers have the same immediate successor. 5. Any property belonging to 0 and to the immediate successor of any number that also has that property belongs to all numbers.

Giuseppe Peano
Two, Numbers, Number 2
"Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science" by Peter Atkins, Ch. 10, (p. 333), 2003.

Geometric calculus consists in a system of operations analogous to those of algebraic calculus, but in which the entities on which the calculations are carried out, instead of being numbers, are geometric entities which we shall define.

Giuseppe Peano
Numbers, Operations, Entity
Giuseppe Peano (2013). “Geometric Calculus: According to the Ausdehnungslehre of H. Grassmann”, p.17, Springer Science & Business Media

Certainly it is permitted to anyone to put forward whatever hypotheses he wishes, and to develop the logical consequences contained in those hypotheses. But in order that this work merit the name of Geometry, it is necessary that these hypotheses or postulates express the result of the more simple and elementary observations of physical figures.

Giuseppe Peano
Simple, Order, Names
"The Mathematical Philosophy of Giuseppe Peano". Philosophy of Science Vol. 30, No. 3, July 1963.

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