Thursday, October 3, 2019

Giuseppe Peano Essay Example for Free

Giuseppe Peano Essay Giuseppe Peano spent most of his career in teaching mathematics at the University of Turin in Italy. He was a fanatic of mathematics who contributed many ideas to mathematical logic but later on gave more focus on symbolic logic and developing auxiliary languages. He wrote his mathematical ideas and logic in 200 books and papers (Giuseppe, 2006). Peano was born on August 27, 1858 to a poor family in an Italian farm in Spinetta, near Cuneo, Italy. He graduated with high honors in the degree of Mathematics at the University of Turin wherein he later worked as its mathematics professor starting in 1880. At the same time in 1886, he was also employed in the Royal Military Academy. Peano’s contribution to mathematics includes differential equations and vector analysis and his famous space-filling curve that contradicts some of the existing axioms and concepts of mathematics in his time (â€Å"Guiseppe†, 2006; Golba, 2007). Another contribution of Peano was in the development of symbolic logic. He introduced many symbols, such as the symbol which means â€Å"belonging to the set of† that is still used in science and math today. Peano had reasoned that the ambiguity of the ordinary language in his time tends to hamper the progress in the development and study of mathematics therefore he proposed many symbols to use for a much easier learning and universal understanding. He believed that the scientific community needed a universal language so that anybody who spoke different languages may understand each other through it. In 1891 and for the next fifteen years , Peano worked on a project he called Formulario Project or better described as an Encyclopedia of Mathematics† that proposed to use mathematical symbols by publishing all the 4200 symbolized formulas and symbols of science using his invented standard notation (â€Å"Guiseppe†, 2006; Golba, 2007) . Peano became an active promoter of auxiliary language. In the second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, (right after the First International Conference of Philosophy where he was a member of the patronage committee), he presented a paper that touch on the subject of how to correctly form definitions in mathematics, including the question of â€Å"how do you define a definition? in the first place. This of course is made to arouse an interest and a need for an auxiliary language. By now, Peano’s main interest and quest (for the rest of his life) had shifted to this philosophical view to such an extent that he had neglected his calculus (â€Å"Guiseppe†, 2006; Golba, 2007). The popularity of Peano’s symbolic logic had prompted a resolution in a mathematics conference calling for the formation of an international auxiliary language to spread its mathematical and commercial idea. In 1903, Peano presented his work of a universal auxiliary language called Latino sine flexione, (Latin without flexions, eventually recognized as Interlingua) which uses the popular and widely known Latin vocabulary but stripped of its grammar and without its â€Å"irregular and anomalous forms† (â€Å"Guiseppe†, 2006; Golba, 2007). In 1908 Peano became a director of the Academia pro Interlingua in Turin, a congress that was set up in order to study and develop auxiliary languages. At the same time, he published the fifth and final edition of the Formulario project (â€Å"Formulario Mathematico†) with all proven theorems in 516 pages. This project had not been much of a success at that time since it was published in Peano’s new Latino sine flexione language which nobody really understood (Golba, 2007). Even with the opposition against Peano and his subsequent resignation in the Military Academy due to the students’ resentment of having to learn his mathematical symbols which they reasoned they will never use in real life, by 1910 Peano continued to develop and promote auxiliary languages. He remained to teach in the University of Turin until his death of a heart attack on April 20, 1932. Peano got married in 1887 but he was childless (â€Å"Guiseppe†, 2006; Golba, 2007).

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