HiPhiS seminar "Origins of mathematical demonstration".

  • Category:
  • Dates: March 28, 2017
  • Opening hours: 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
  • Location:

Tuesday, March 28, 2017 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Polytech, bât. 31, amphi Serge Peytavin, Triolet campus.
Free admission.
Inter-university seminar on the History and Philosophy of Science, 2017 cycle "Causes, foundations, origins".
Conference presented by Gilbert Arsacmathematician, historian and teacher of mathematics, Honorary Professor at Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1.

Summary:

Around the fourth and third centuries BC, mathematics underwent a transformation in Greece, culminating in the writing of Euclid's "Elements", the most widely distributed book in the world after the Bible, whose essential originality was to present mathematics as knowledge logically organized by rigorous demonstrations, a feature found in no other civilization.Around the same time, the Greeks were the only ones to discover the phenomena of incommensurability in geometry and irrationality in numbers. The talk will set out the historical background and examine how much of these revolutions can be attributed to internal motivations in mathematics, or to general philosophical debates in contemporary Greece.
Joint invitation with IMAG - Institut Montpellierrain Alexandre Grothendieck.
Find out more