James T. Smith – författare

The Italian mathematician Mario Pieri (1860–1913) played a major role in the development of algebraic geometry and foundations of mathematics around the turn of the twentieth century.  This volume is the second in a series intended to make Pieri’s research in diverse fields—mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics, foundations of projective, inversive, and elementary geometry, algebraic and differential geometry, and vector analysis—accessible to today’s scholars and to assess its importance (yet little recognized) in historical and modern contexts. 

The Legacy of Mario Pieri in Foundations and Philosophy of Mathematics examines Pieri’s underlying philosophy of mathematics and his research goals, highlighting one of his most influential achievements, his axiomatizations of projective and elementary geometry. Its chapters include three of Pieri’s pioneering works, translated by the authors and appearing in English for the first time, as well as an analysis of the role of this research in its larger context. Together, these translations and the accompanying interpretation accurately capture Pieri’s expository style, philosophical perspective, and his foundational research, which has influenced generations.

With an excellent index, exhaustive references, and engaging discussions that reveal Pieri’s work in its historical context, this volume will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics and logic, as well as readers with a general knowledge of geometry at the intermediate level.

A list of errata can be found on the author Smith’s personal webpage.

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) was a renowned Polish/American mathematician, a giant of the twentieth century, who helped establish the foundations of geometry, set theory, model theory, algebraic logic and universal algebra. Throughout his career, he taught mathematics and logic at universities and sometimes in secondary schools. Many of his writings before 1939 were in Polish and remained inaccessible to most mathematicians and historians until now.

This self-contained book focuses on Tarski’s early contributions to geometry and mathematics education, including the famous Banach–Tarski paradoxical decomposition of a sphere as well as high-school mathematical topics and pedagogy. These themes are significant since Tarski’s later research on geometry and its foundations stemmed in part from his early employment as a high-school mathematics teacher and teacher-trainer. The book contains careful translations and much newly uncovered social background of these works written during Tarski’s years in Poland.

Alfred Tarski: Early Work in Poland serves the mathematical, educational, philosophical and historical communities by publishing Tarski’s early writings in a broadly accessible form, providing background from archival work in Poland and updating Tarski’s bibliography.

A list of errata can be found on the author Smith’s personal webpage.