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Paolo Mancosu continues an investigation he began in his 2013 book Inside the Zhivago Storm, which the New York Book Review of Books described as "a tour de force of literary detection worthy of a scholarly Sherlock Holmes". In this book Mancosu extends his detective work by reconstructing the network of contacts that helped Pasternak smuggle the typescripts of Doctor Zhivago outside the Soviet Union and following the vicissitudes of the typescripts when they arrived in the West. Mancosu draws on a wealth of firsthand sources to piece together the long-standing mysteries surrounding the many different typescripts that played a role in the publication of Doctor Zhivago, thereby solving the problem of which typescript served as the basis of the first Russian edition: a pirate publication covertly orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He also offers a new perspective, aided by the recently declassified CIA documents, by narrowing the focus as to who might have passed the typescript to the CIA. In the process, Mancosu reveals details of events that were treated as top secret by all those involved, vividly recounting the history of the publication of Pasternak's epic work with all its human and political ramifications.
An Introduction to Proof Theory provides an accessible introduction to the theory of proofs, with details of proofs worked out and examples and exercises to aid the reader's understanding. It also serves as a companion to reading the original pathbreaking articles by Gerhard Gentzen. The first half covers topics in structural proof theory, including the Goedel-Gentzen translation of classical into intuitionistic logic (and arithmetic), natural deduction and the normalization theorems (for both NJ and NK), the sequent calculus, including cut-elimination and mid-sequent theorems, and various applications of these results. The second half examines ordinal proof theory, specifically Gentzen's consistency proof for first-order Peano Arithmetic. The theory of ordinal notations and other elements of ordinal theory are developed from scratch, and no knowledge of set theory is presumed. The proof methods needed to establish proof-theoretic results, especially proof by induction, are introduced in stages throughout the text. Mancosu, Galvan, and Zach's introduction will provide a solid foundation for those looking to understand this central area of mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics.
The conflict between Soviet Communists and Boris Pasternak over the publication of Doctor Zhivago did not end when he won the Nobel Prize, or even when the author died. Paolo Mancosu tells how Pasternak's expulsion from the Soviet Writers' Union left him in financial difficulty. Milan publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and Sergio d'Angelo, who had brought the typescript of Doctor Zhivago to Feltrinelli, were among those who arranged a smuggling operation to help him.After Pasternak's death, Olga Ivinskaya, his companion, literary assistant, and the inspiration for Zhivago's Lara, also received some of the Zhivago royalties. After the KGB intercepted Pasternak's will on her behalf, the Soviets arrested and sentenced her and her daughter, Irina Emelianova, to eight years and three years of labor camp, respectively. The ensuing international outrage inspired a secret campaign in the West to win their freedom.Mancosu's new book-the first to explore the post-Nobel history of Pasternak and Ivinskaya-provides extraordinary detail on these events, in a thrilling account that involves KGB interceptions, fabricated documents, smugglers, and much more. While a general reader will respond to the dramatic human story, specialists will be rewarded with a rich assemblage of new archival material, especially letters of Pasternak, Ivinskaya, Feltrinelli, and d'Angelo from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives and the Feltrinelli Archives in Milan.
Paolo Mancosu provides an original investigation of historical and systematic aspects of the notions of abstraction and infinity and their interaction. A familiar way of introducing concepts in mathematics rests on so-called definitions by abstraction. An example of this is Hume's Principle, which introduces the concept of number by stating that two concepts have the same number if and only if the objects falling under each one of them can be put in one-one correspondence. This principle is at the core of neo-logicism. In the first two chapters of the book, Mancosu provides a historical analysis of the mathematical uses and foundational discussion of definitions by abstraction up to Frege, Peano, and Russell. Chapter one shows that abstraction principles were quite widespread in the mathematical practice that preceded Frege's discussion of them and the second chapter provides the first contextual analysis of Frege's discussion of abstraction principles in section 64 of the Grundlagen. In the second part of the book, Mancosu discusses a novel approach to measuring the size of infinite sets known as the theory of numerosities and shows how this new development leads to deep mathematical, historical, and philosophical problems. The final chapter of the book explore how this theory of numerosities can be exploited to provide surprisingly novel perspectives on neo-logicism.
Paolo Mancosu presents a series of innovative studies in the history and the philosophy of logic and mathematics in the first half of the twentieth century. The Adventure of Reason is divided into five main sections: history of logic (from Russell to Tarski); foundational issues (Hilbert's program, constructivity, Wittgenstein, Goedel); mathematics and phenomenology (Weyl, Becker, Mahnke); nominalism (Quine, Tarski); semantics (Tarski, Carnap, Neurath). Mancosu exploits extensive untapped archival sources to make available a wealth of new material that deepens in significant ways our understanding of these fascinating areas of modern intellectual history. At the same time, the book is a contribution to recent philosophical debates, in particular on the prospects for a successful nominalist reconstruction of mathematics, the nature of finitist intuition, the viability of alternative definitions of logical consequence, and the extent to which phenomenology can hope to account for the exact sciences.
Contemporary philosophy of mathematics offers us an embarrassment
of riches. Among the major areas of work one could list
developments of the classical foundational programs, analytic
approaches to epistemology and ontology of mathematics, and
developments at the intersection of history and philosophy of
mathematics. But anyone familiar with contemporary philosophy of
mathematics will be aware of the need for new approaches that pay
closer attention to mathematical practice. This book is the first
attempt to give a coherent and unified presentation of this new
wave of work in philosophy of mathematics. The new approach is
innovative at least in two ways. First, it holds that there are
important novel characteristics of contemporary mathematics that
are just as worthy of philosophical attention as the distinction
between constructive and non-constructive mathematics at the time
of the foundational debates. Secondly, it holds that many topics
which escape purely formal logical treatment--such as
visualization, explanation, and understanding--can nonetheless be
subjected to philosophical analysis.
Mancosu provides the first comprehensive account of the relationship between mathematical advances of the seventeenth century and the philosophy of mathematics of the period. Starting with the Renaissance debates on the certainty of mathematics, Mancosu leads the reader through the foundational issues raised by the emergence of these new mathematical techniques. He draws a sophisticated picture of the subtle dependencies between technical development and philosophical reflection in seventeenth century mathematics.
Contemporary philosophy of mathematics offers us an embarrassment
of riches. Among the major areas of work one could list
developments of the classical foundational programs, analytic
approaches to epistemology and ontology of mathematics, and
developments at the intersection of history and philosophy of
mathematics. But anyone familiar with contemporary philosophy of
mathematics will be aware of the need for new approaches that pay
closer attention to mathematical practice. This book is the first
attempt to give a coherent and unified presentation of this new
wave of work in philosophy of mathematics. The new approach is
innovative at least in two ways. First, it holds that there are
important novel characteristics of contemporary mathematics that
are just as worthy of philosophical attention as the distinction
between constructive and non-constructive mathematics at the time
of the foundational debates. Secondly, it holds that many topics
which escape purely formal logical treatment--such as
visualization, explanation, and understanding--can nonetheless be
subjected to philosophical analysis.
The 17th century saw a dramatic development in mathematical theory and practice. With the recovery of many of the classical Greek mathematical texts, new techniques were developed, and within 100 years the rules of modern analytic geometry, geometry of indivisibles, arithmetic of infinites, and calculus had been developed. Although many technical studies have been devoted to these developments, Mancosu provides the first comprehensive account of the foundational issues raised in the relationship between mathematical advances of this period and philosophy of mathematics of the time.
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