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Looking back at these efforts

As stated at the outset, this article is intended to be a brief history of the arithmetization program. It seeks to set forth the achievements of mathematicians working in that program that have led to what is important in mathematics today. The view presented has been dubbed "the standard account" by some, for the simple reason that it is not the only account. In such history articles, it is usual to include alternate views of events within the main narrative. That practice is not adhered to in this article. Instead, summaries of those alternate views are gathered here, at the end of the article, with the intention of providing a platform for inserting additional entries and, if appropriate, for linking to additional articles.

Concurrent "corrections" to arithmetization

One modern commentator, forthright in his support of the arithmetization program, generally, and of the contribution of his countryman Bolzano, in particular, nevertheless advances somewhat of a caveat in the form of the following contrast:

• it was essential to move analysis off of its intuitive/geometric base onto a rigourous/arithmetic base
• mathematics continued to develop during the arithmetization period, somewhat as a "correction" to it

In his own words:

[By] the first half of the nineteenth century the building of mathematical analysis was raised to such a height that continuing its construction without fortifying its foundations was unthinkable. This brought a period of great revision of the foundations of analysis...; the development of the other branches of mathematics continued, of course, simultaneously and in mutual interaction.

It seems evident that ... the revision could not follow other direction than that of consequential arithmetization of analysis.... [Yet,] this arithmetization ... was later corrected by the modern development of mathematics; after all, even in the period mentioned the dialectics of this process can be observed: so, for example, B. Riemann who on the one hand contributed considerably to the arithmetization of analysis by his theory of integral, was on the other hand the ingenious builder of the geometric theory of analytic functions.

A role for intuition in mathematics

What today are commonplace notions in undergraduate mathematics were anything but commonplace among practicing mathematicians even a quarter century after the 1872 achievements of Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass. In 1899, addressing the American Mathematical Society, James Pierpont spoke to show these two things:

1. why arithmetical methods form the only sure foundation in analysis at present known
2. why arguments based on intuition cannot be considered final in analysis

In a later, printed version of his address, Pierpont prefaced his words with the following:

We are all of us aware of a movement among us which Klein has so felicitously styled the arithmetization of mathematics. Few of us have much real sympathy with it, if indeed we understand it. It seems a useless waste of time to prove by laborious $\varepsilon$ and $\delta$ methods what the old methods prove so satisfactorily in a few words. Indeed many of the things which exercise the mind of one whose eyes have been opened in the school of Weierstrass seem mere fads to the outsider. As well try to prove that two and two make four!

The term "arithmetization of mathematics," which Pierpont here ascribed to Klein, has also been credited to Kronecker -- perhaps to others as well? In any case, Pierpont ended his 1899 address with this paean to the labours of Weierstrass and others:

The mathematician of to-day, trained in the school of Weierstrass, is fond of speaking of his science as die absolut klare Wissenschaft. Any attempts to drag in metaphysical speculations are resented with indignant energy. With almost painful emotions he looks back at the sorry mixture of metaphysics and mathematics which was so common in the last century and at the beginning of this. The analysis of to-day is indeed a transparent science. Built up on the simple notion of number, its truths are the most solidly established in the whole range of human knowledge.

Today, more than 100 years after Pierpont's address, intuition is present in mathematics in at least two, quite different, respects:

1. as an accompaniment to the reintroduction of infinitesimals by non-standard analysis
2. as an essential part of what is involved in mature, high-level mathematical thinking

According to the "standard account," the arithmetization program excised intuition from the foundations of mathematics. With the development (or, as it has alternatively been put, the "discovery") of non-standard analysis, intuition was restored to legitimacy in the foundations of mathematics. Robinson maintained that results achieved using nonstandard analysis could not have been achieved "just as well" by standard methods and that translation of non-standard results into standard terms "usually complicated matters considerably." He explained the reason for this difficulty as follows:

Our approach has a certain natural appeal, as shown by the fact that it was preceded in history by a long line of attempts to introduce infinitely small and infinitely large numbers into Analysis.

The "natural appeal" to which Robinson refered is grounded in two factors:

1. nonstandard analysis is often simpler and more intuitive in a very direct, immediate way than standard approaches
2. the concept of infinitesimals had always seemed natural and intuitively preferable to more convoluted and less intuitive sorts of rigor.

These "natural advantages" of using infinitesimals could now be exploited, now that nonstandard analysis had shown that their use was "safe for consumption" in mathematics!

In a very different sense, intuition is present in mathematical thinking at the highest levels, quite apart from and irrespective of the nature of foundations theory. In the remarks quoted above, Pierpont noted what may seem to be a very uncontroversial result among several that are said to have proceeded from the arithmetization program, namely, the replacement of "arguments based on intuition" with "arithmetic methods" as the foundation of analysis. Even so, an objection has been raised in the form of a suggestion that an untoward fixation on "rigourous formalism" can lead to a loss of the mathematical intuition that is essential to working at a mature level:

The point of rigour is not to destroy all intuition; instead, it should be used to destroy bad intuition while clarifying and elevating good intuition. It is only with a combination of both rigorous formalism and good intuition that one can tackle complex mathematical problems; one needs the former to correctly deal with the fine details, and the latter to correctly deal with the big picture. . . . So once you are fully comfortable with rigorous mathematical thinking, you should revisit your intuitions on the subject and use your new thinking skills to test and refine these intuitions rather than discard them. . . .

The ideal state to reach is when every heuristic argument naturally suggests its rigorous counterpart, and vice versa.

A place for infinitesimals in mathematics

The "standard account" asserts that arithmetization banished infinitesimals from mathematics. Certainly, the banishment of infinitesimals was considered an important reason for pursuing the arithmetization program In reality, however, the work on non-Archimedean systems continued unabated during and after the period of arithmetization, as documented by P. Ehrlich.

Even so, a very significant "correction" of arithmetization, the development of non-standard analysis, was described generally by another modern commentator as follows:

Weierstrass' definition of limit appeared to finally nail the coffin of the departed quantities and led to a complete abandonment of the original idea of infinitesimals. However, in the 1960s the ghosts have been resurrected by Abraham Robinson and placed on the sound foundation of the non-standard analysis thus vindicating the intuition of [Newton and Leibniz,] the founding fathers.

Robinson's goal for non-standard analysis was to create a system more intuitively appealing, while retaining all of the rigour of standard analysis. He did this by (rigourously) extending the field of reals is (rigorously) to include infinitesimal numbers and infinite numbers. The new, extended field is called the field of hyperreal numbers.

Here is Robinson's definition of limit:

$\displaystyle \lim_{x \to a} f(x) = L$, if and only if $f(x)$ is infinitely close to $L$ whenever $x ≠ a$ is infinitely close to $a$.

One modern commentator has characterized the effect (in some quarters) of Robinson's work in non-standard analysis as "a rehabilitation of the use of infinitesimals in mathematics."

• Robinson himself proposed that the techniques of non-standard analysis would show (at least some) of the infinitesimal methods used by the founders of calculus to be "correct and consistent."

Arithmetization and rigour

Some (Dauben, Katz et. al.) working with the new non-standard methods challenged what is reasonably termed "the standard account" among both 19th and 20th century mathematicians, namely, that the arithmetization program resulted in an increase of rigor.

Interestingly, in his own historical writing, Robinson sometimes made the same point concerning the triumph, as many historians (and mathematicians as well) have come to see it, of the success of Cauchy-Weierstrassian epsilontics over infinitesimals in making the calculus "rigorous" in the course of the nineteenth century. In fact, one of the most important achievements of Robinson's work in nonstandard analysis has been his conclusive demonstration of the poverty of this kind of historicism.

Set theoretic foundations

The following contrast highlights a modern issue in our understanding of the arithmetization program:

• to the mathematicians who developed it, the arithmetization program signified efforts to develop a foundation for analysis, i.e. the calculus, in terms of the natural numbers
• after the development of naive set theory by Cantor, the arithmatization program came to signify the set-theoretic definition of function and the set-theoretic construction of the real line

There were several important consequences of this shift in meaning and intent of the arithmetization program, some of which were and remain contentious.

Kronecker and other intuitionists rejected such efforts to extend the arithmetization program by defining the natural numbers using set theoretic concepts, arguing instead as follows:

• all the definitions appearing in the field of analysis can be reduced to the whole numbers and their properties
• the whole domain of this branch of mathematics can be explained basically from arithmetic

Kronecker's view was that mathematics "should be constructed rigidly on the basis of intuition of natural numbers."

Consequences for teaching

As has been noted by many, arithmetization brought about a shift in emphasis from geometric to algebraic reasoning. Again, this shift was certainly considered an important reason for pursuing arithmetization. What is not widely appreciated is that an important consequence of this shift was a change in the way mathematics is taught today.

Consider, for example, the pragmatic value of nonstandard analysis in terms of its application in teaching the calculus. Here it is necessary to consider the success of Jerome Keisler's textbook Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals, which uses nonstandard analysis to explain in an introductory course the basic ideas of calculus.... Not long ago a study was undertaken to assess the validity of the claim that "from this nonstandard approach, the definitions of the basic concepts [of the calculus] become simpler and the arguments more intuitive."[40] Kathleen Sullivan reported the results of her dissertation, written at the University of Wisconsin and designed to determine the pedagogical usefulness of nonstandard analysis in teaching calculus, in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1976.... . . . the results [, both as measured by a calculus test given to the students and by the comments of the instructors,] are remarkable in their support of the heuristic value of using nonstandard analysis in the classroom.

Finally, the shift in the meaning of arithmetization led to logicism, a currently prevalent philosophical position that all of mathematics should be derivable from logic and set theory. Logicism, in turn, led to Hilbert's program, to the theorems of Gödel, Turing, and Chaitin on undecidability and incompleteness, and to non-standard analysis.

References

• Bair, Jacques, et. al., "Is Mathematical History Written by the Victors?" Notices of the American Mathematical Society, (60) No 7, pp. 886-904, URL: __________

• Dauben, Joseph W., (1985). "Abraham Robinson and Nonstandard Analysis: History, Philosophy, and Foundations of Mathematics," URL: __________

• Davis, Isaac, (2009). "An Introduction to Nonstandard Analysis," URL: ______

• Laszczyko, Piotr B., Katz, Mikhail G., Sherry, David, (2012) "Ten Misconceptions from the History of Analysis and their Debunking," URL: arXiv:1202.4153v1

• Robinson, Abraham (1965). "On the Theory of Normal Families," Acta Philosophica Fennica 18:159-84.