Surigao State College of Technology

Surigao City

Reporter: Lester, Bongato B.

Course Code: Major 1

Topic: Modern Mathematics 20TH Century

Instructor: Ms. Maria Fe C. Guerra

Introduction:

The 20th Century continued the trend of the 19th towards increasing generalization and abstraction in mathematics,
in which the notion of axioms as “self-evident truths” was largely discarded in favour of an emphasis on such logical
concepts as consistency and completeness.

It also saw mathematics become a major profession, involving thousands of new Ph.D.s each year and jobs in both
teaching and industry, and the development of hundreds of specialized areas and fields of study, such as group
theory, knot theory, sheaf theory, topology, graph theory, functional analysis, singularity theory, catastrophe theory,
chaos theory, model theory, category theory, game theory, complexity theory and many more

he early 20th Century also saw the beginnings of the rise of the field of mathematical logic, building on the earlier
advances of Gottlob Frege, which came to fruition in the hands of Giuseppe Peano, L.E.J. Brouwer, David Hilbert
and, particularly, Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead, whose monumental joint work the “Principia Mathematica”
was so influential in mathematical and philosophical logicism.

The century began with a historic convention at the Sorbonne in Paris in the summer of 1900 which is largely
remembered for a lecture by the young German mathematician David Hilbert in which he set out what he saw as
the 23 greatest unsolved mathematical problems of the day. These “Hilbert problems” effectively set the agenda for
20th Century mathematics, and laid down the gauntlet for generations of mathematicians to come. Of these original
23 problems, 10 have now been solved, 7 are partially solved, and 2 (the Riemann hypothesis and the Kronecker-
Weber theorem on abelian extensions) are still open, with the remaining 4 being too loosely formulated to be stated
as solved or not.

Hilbert was himself a brilliant mathematician, responsible for several theorems and some entirely new mathematical
concepts, as well as overseeing the development of what amounted to a whole new style of abstract mathematical
thinking. Hilbert's approach signalled the shift to the modern axiomatic method, where axioms are not taken to be
self-evident truths. He was unfailingly optimistic about the future of mathematics, famously declaring in a 1930 radio
interview “We must know. We will know!”, and was a well-loved leader of the mathematical community during the
first part of the century.

However, the Austrian Kurt Gödel was soon to put some very severe constraints on what could and could not be
solved, and turned mathematics on its head with his famous incompleteness theorem, which proved the
unthinkable - that there could be solutions to mathematical problems which were true but which could never be
proved.

Alan Turing, perhaps best known for his war-time work in breaking the German enigma code, spent his pre-war
years trying to clarify and simplify Gödel’s rather abstract proof. His methods led to some conclusions that were
perhaps even more devastating than Gödel’s, including the idea that there was no way of telling beforehand which
problems were provable and which unprovable. But, as a spin-off, his work also led to the development of
computers and the first considerations of such concepts as artificial intelligence.

With the gradual and wilful destruction of the mathematics community of Germany and Austria by the anti-Jewish
Nazi regime in the 1930 and 1940s, the focus of world mathematics moved to America, particularly to the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, which attempted to reproduce the collegiate atmosphere of the old European
universities in rural New Jersey. Many of the brightest European mathematicians, including Hermann Weyl, John
von Neumann, Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein, fled the Nazis to this safe haven.

John von Neumann is considered one of the foremost mathematicians in modern history, another mathematical
child prodigy who went on to make major contributions to a vast range of fields. In addition to his physical work in
quantum theory and his role in the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear physics and the hydrogen
bomb, he is particularly remembered as a pioneer of game theory, and particularly for his design model for a
stored-program digital computer that uses a processing unit and a separate storage structure to hold both
instructions and data, a general architecture that most electronic computers follow even today.
André Weil was another refugee from the war in Europe, after narrowly avoiding death on a couple of occasions.
His theorems, which allowed connections to be made between number theory, algebra, geometry and topology, are
considered among the greatest achievements of modern mathematics. He was also responsible for setting up a
group of French mathematicians who, under the secret nom-de-plume of Nicolas Bourbaki, wrote many influential
books on the mathematics of the 20th Century.

Perhaps the greatest heir to Weil’s legacy was Alexander Grothendieck, a charismatic and beloved figure in 20th
Century French mathematics. Grothendieck was a structuralist, interested in the hidden structures beneath all
mathematics, and in the 1950s he created a powerful new language which enabled mathematical structures to be
seen in a new way, thus allowing new solutions in number theory, geometry, even in fundamental physics. His
“theory of schemes” allowed certain of Weil's number theory conjectures to be solved, and his “theory of topoi” is
highly relevant to mathematical logic. In addition, he gave an algebraic proof of the Riemann-Roch theorem, and
provided an algebraic definition of the fundamental group of a curve. Although, after the 1960s, Grothendieck all but
abandoned mathematics for radical politics, his achievements in algebraic geometry have fundamentally
transformed the mathematical landscape, perhaps no less than those of Cantor, Gödel and Hilbert, and he is
considered by some to be one of the dominant figures of the whole of 20th Century mathematics.

Paul Erdös was another inspired but distinctly non-establishment figure of 20th Century mathematics. The
immensely prolific and famously eccentric Hungarian mathematician worked with hundreds of different
collaborators on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory,
set theory, and probability theory. As a humorous tribute, an "Erdös number" is given to mathematicians according
to their collaborative proximity to him. He was also known for offering small prizes for solutions to various
unresolved problems (such as the Erdös conjecture on arithmetic progressions), some of which are still active after
his death.

The field of complex dynamics (which is defined by the iteration of functions on complex number spaces) was
developed by two Frenchmen, Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia, early in the 20th Century. But it only really gained
much attention in the 1970s and 1980s with the beautiful computer plottings of Julia sets and, particularly, of the
Mandelbrot sets of yet another French mathematician, Benoît Mandelbrot. Julia and Mandelbrot fractals are closely
related, and it was Mandelbrot who coined the term fractal, and who became known as the father of fractal
geometry.

The Mandelbrot set involves repeated iterations of complex quadratic polynomial equations of the form zn+1 = zn2 + c,
(where z is a number in the complex plane of the form x + iy). The iterations produce a form of feedback based on
recursion, in which smaller parts exhibit approximate reduced-size copies of the whole, and which are infinitely
complex (so that, however much one zooms in and magifies a part, it exhibits just as much complexity).

Paul Cohen is an example of a second generation Jewish immigrant who followed the American dream to fame and
success. His work rocked the mathematical world in the 1960s, when he proved that Cantor's continuum hypothesis
about the possible sizes of infinite sets (one of Hilbert’s original 23 problems) could be both true AND not true, and
that there were effectively two completely separate but valid mathematical worlds, one in which the continuum
hypothesis was true and one where it was not. Since this result, all modern mathematical proofs must insert a
statement declaring whether or not the result depends on the continuum hypothesis.

Another of Hilbert’s problems was finally resolved in 1970, when the young Russian Yuri Matiyasevich finally
proved that Hilbert’s tenth problem was impossible, i.e. that there is no general method for determining when
polynomial equations have a solution in whole numbers. In arriving at his proof, Matiyasevich built on decades of
work by the American mathematician Julia Robinson, in a great show of internationalism at the height of the Cold
War.

In additon to complex dynamics, another field that benefitted greatly from the advent of the electronic computer,
and particulary from its ability to carry out a huge number of repeated iterations of simple mathematical formulas
which would be impractical to do by hand, was chaos theory. Chaos theory tells us that some systems seem to
exhibit random behaviour even though they are not random at all, and conversely some systems may have roughly
predictable behaviour but are fundamentally unpredictable in any detail. The possible behaviours that a chaotic
system may have can also be mapped graphically, and it was discovered that these mappings, known as "strange
attractors", are fractal in nature (the more you zoom in, the more detail can be seen, although the overall pattern
remains the same).

An early pioneer in modern chaos theory was Edward Lorenz, whose interest in chaos came about accidentally
through his work on weather prediction. Lorenz's discovery came in 1961, when a computer model he had been
running was actually saved using three-digit numbers rather than the six digits he had been working with, and this
tiny rounding error produced dramatically different results. He discovered that small changes in initial conditions
can produce large changes in the long-term outcome - a phenomenon he described by the term “butterfly effect” -
and he demonstrated this with his Lorenz attractor, a fractal structure corresponding to the behaviour of the Lorenz
oscillator (a 3-dimensional dynamical system that exhibits chaotic flow).

1976 saw a proof of the four colour theorem by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, the first major theorem to be
proved using a computer. The four colour conjecture was first proposed in 1852 by Francis Guthrie (a student of
Augustus De Morgan), and states that, in any given separation of a plane into contiguous regions (called a “map”)
the regions can be coloured using at most four colours so that no two adjacent regions have the same colour. One
proof was given by Alfred Kempe in 1879, but it was shown to be incorrect by Percy Heawood in 1890 in proving
the five colour theorem. The eventual proof that only four colours suffice turned out to be significantly harder. Appel
and Haken’s solution required some 1,200 hours of computer time to examine around 1,500 configurations.

Also in the 1970s, origami became recognized as a serious mathematical method, in some cases more powerful
than Euclidean geometry. In 1936, Margherita Piazzola Beloch had shown how a length of paper could be folded to
give the cube root of its length, but it was not until 1980 that an origami method was used to solve the "doubling the
cube" problem which had defeated ancient Greek geometers. An origami proof of the equally intractible "trisecting
the angle" problem followed in 1986. The Japanese origami expert Kazuo Haga has at least three mathematical
theorems to his name, and his unconventional folding techniques have demonstrated many unexpected
geometrical results.

The British mathematician Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem for ALL numbers in 1995, some 350
years after Fermat’s initial posing. It was an achievement Wiles had set his sights on early in life and pursued
doggedly for many years. In reality, though, it was a joint effort of several steps involving many mathematicans over
several years, including Goro Shimura, Yutaka Taniyama, Gerhard Frey, Jean-Pierre Serre and Ken Ribet, with
Wiles providing the links and the final synthesis and, specifically, the final proof of the Taniyama-Shimura
Conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves. The proof itself is over 100 pages long.

The most recent of the great conjectures to be proved was the Poincaré Conjecture, which was solved in 2002
(over 100 years after Poincaré first posed it) by the eccentric and reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori
Perelman. However, Perelman, who lives a frugal life with his mother in a suburb of St. Petersburg, turned down
the $1 million prize, claiming that "if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed". The conjecture, now a
theorem, states that, if a loop in connected, finite boundaryless 3-dimensional space can be continuously tightened
to a point, in the same way as a loop drawn on a 2-dimensional sphere can, then the space is a three-dimensional
sphere. Perelman provided an elegant but extremely complex solution involving the ways in which 3-dimensional
shapes can be “wrapped up” in even higher dimensions. Perelman has also made landmark contributions to
Riemannian geometry and geometric topology.

John Nash, the American economist and mathematician whose battle against paranoid schizophrenia has recently
been popularized by the Hollywood movie “A Beautiful Mind”, did some important work in game theory, differential
geometry and partial differential equations which have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and
events inside complex systems in daily life, such as in market economics, computing, artificial intelligence,
accounting and military theory.

The Englishman John Horton Conway established the rules for the so-called "Game of Life" in 1970, an early
example of a "cellular automaton" in which patterns of cells evolve and grow in a gridm which became extremely
popular among computer scientists. He has made important contributions to many branches of pure mathematics,
such as game theory, group theory, number theory and geometry, and has also come up with some wonderful-
sounding concepts like surreal numbers, the grand antiprism and monstrous moonshine, as well as mathematical
games such as Sprouts, Philosopher's Football and the Soma Cube.

Other mathematics-based recreational

puzzles became even more popular among
the general public, including Rubik's Cube
(1974) and Sudoku (1980), both of which
developed into full-blown crazes on a scale
only previously seen with the 19th Century
fads of Tangrams (1817) and the Fifteen
puzzle (1879). In their turn, they generated
attention from serious mathematicians
interested in exploring the theoretical limits
and underpinnings of the games.

Computers continue to aid in the identification

of phenomena such as Mersenne primes
numbers (a prime number that is one less
than a power of two - see the section on 17th
Century Mathematics). In 1952, an early
computer known as SWAC identified 2257-1 as
the 13th Mersenne prime number, the first
new one to be found in 75 years, before going
on to identify several more even larger.

With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s,

the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search
(GIMPS), a collaborative project of volunteers Approximations for π
who use freely available computer software to
search for Mersenne primes, has led to
another leap in the discovery rate. Currently, the 13 largest Mersenne primes were all discovered in this way, and
the largest (the 45th Mersenne prime number and also the largest known prime number of any kind) was
discovered in 2009 and contains nearly 13 million digits. The search also continues for ever more accurate
computer approximations for the irrational number π, with the current record standing at over 5 trillion decimal
places.

The P versus NP problem, introduced in 1971 by Stephen Cook, is a major unsolved problem in computer science,
another of the Clay Mathematics Institute's million dollar Millennium Prize problems. At its simplest, it asks whether
every problem whose solution can be efficiently checked by a computer can also be efficiently solved by a
computer (or put another way, whether questions exist whose answer can be quickly checked, but which require an
impossibly long time to solve by any direct procedure), a simple enough sounding problem, but one which has
eluded mathematicians and computer scientists for 40 years. A possible solution by Vinay Deolalikar in 2010,
claiming to prove that P is not equal to NP (and thus such insolulable-but-easily-checked problems do exist), has
attracted much attention but has not as yet been fully accepted by the computer science community.

G.H. Hard -The eccentric British mathematician, is known for his achievements in number theory and
mathematical analysis. But he is perhaps even better known for his adoption and mentoring of the self-taught Indian
mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan.

in 1913, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a 23-year old shipping clerk from Madras, India, wrote to Hardy (and other
academics at Cambridge), claiming, among other things, to have devised a formula that calculated the number of
primes up to a hundred million with generally no error. The self-taught and obsessive Ramanujan had managed to
prove all of Riemann’s results and more with almost no knowledge of developments in the Western world and no
formal tuition. He claimed that most of his ideas came to him in dreams.

Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead -were British mathematicians, logicians and
philosophers, who were in the vanguard of the British revolt against Continental idealism in the early 20th Century
and, between them, they made important contributions in the fields of mathematical logic and set theory.

Whitehead was the elder of the two and came from a more pure mathematics background. He became Russell’s
tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1890s, and then collaborated with his more celebrated ex-student in the
first decade of the 20th Century on their monumental work, the “Principia Mathematica”. After the First World War,
though, much of which Russell spent in prison due to his pacifist activities, the collaboration petered out, and
Whitehead’s academic career remained ever after in the shadow of that of the more flamboyant Russell. He
emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, and spent the rest of his life there.

Whitehead, where he developed into an innovative philosopher, a prolific writer on many subjects, a committed
atheist and an inspired mathematician and logician. Today, he is considered one of the founders of analytic
philosophy, but he wrote on almost every major area of philosophy, particularly metaphysics, ethics, epistemology,
the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of language.

David Hilbert -was a great leader and spokesperson for the discipline of mathematics in the early 20th Century.
But he was an extremely important and respected mathematician in his own right.

Kurt Gödel -grew up a rather strange, sickly child in Vienna. From an early age his parents took to referring to him
as “Herr Varum”, Mr Why, for his insatiable curiosity. At the University of Vienna, Gödel first studied number theory,
but soon turned his attention to mathematical logic, which was to consume him for most of the rest of his life. As a
young man, he was, like Hilbert, optimistic and convinced that mathematics could be made whole again, and would
recover from the uncertainties introduced by the work of Cantor and Riemann. The incompleteness theorem -
surely a mathematician’s worst nightmare - led to something of a crisis in the mathematical community, raising the
spectre of a problem which may turn out to be true but is still unprovable, something which had not been even
considered in the whole two millennia plus history of mathematics.

Alan Turing - The British mathematician Alan Turing is perhaps most famous for his war-time work at the British
code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park where his work led to the breaking of the German enigma code (according
to some, shortening the Second World War at a stroke, and potentially saving thousands of lives). Indeed, he was
the first to address the problem of artificial intelligence, and proposed an experiment now known as the Turing Test
in an attempt to define a standard for a machine to be called "intelligent". By this test, a computer could be said to
"think" if it could fool a human interrogator into thinking that the conversation was with a human. This showed
remarkable foresight at a time long before the Internet, when the only available computers were the size of a room
and less powerful than a modern pocket calculator.

André Weil- was a very influential French mathematician around the middle of the 20th Century. Born into a
properous Jewish family in Paris, he was brother to the well-known philosopher and writer Simone Weil, and both
were child prodigies. He was passionately addicted to mathematics by the age of ten, but he also loved to travel
and study languages (by the age of sixteen he had read the "Bhagavad Gita" in the original Sanskrit). It was also at
this time that he became a founding member, and the de facto early leader, of the so-called Bourbaki group of
French mathematicians. This influential group published many textbooks on advanced 20th Century mathematics
under the assumed name of Nicolas Bourbaki, in an attempt to give a unified description of all mathematics
founded on set theory. Bourbaki has the distinction of having been refused membership of the American
Mathematical Society for being non-existent (although he was a member of the Mathematical Society of France!)

Paul Cohen- was one of a new generation of American mathematician inspired by the influx of European exiles
over the War years. He himself was a second generation Jewish immigrant, but he was dauntingly intelligent and
extremely ambitious. By sheer intelligence and force of will, he went on to garner for himself fame, riches and the
top mathematical prizes.

Julia Robinson - was a shy and sickly child but showed an innate love for, and facility with, numbers from an
early age. She had to overcome many obstacles and to fight to be allowed to continue studying mathematics, but
she persevered, obtained her PhD at Berkeley and married a mathematician, her Berkeley professor, Raphael
Robinson.

Yuri Matiyasevich

Among, his other achievements, Matiyasevich and his colleague Boris Stechkin also developed an interesting
“visual sieve” for prime numbers, which effectively “crosses out” all the composite numbers, leaving only the primes.
He has a theorem on recursively enumerable sets named after him, as well as a polynomial related to the
colourings of triangulation of spheres. He is head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Logic at the St. Petersburg
Department of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences, and is a member of several
mathematical societies and boards.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Hardy-Ramanujan "taxicab numbers"

common anecdote about Ramanujan during this time relates how Hardy arrived at Ramanujan's house in a cab
numbered 1729, a number he claimed to be totally uninteresting. Ramanujan is said to have stated on the spot that,
on the contrary, it was actually a very interesting number mathematically, being the smallest number representable
in two different ways as a sum of two cubes. Such numbers are now sometimes referred to as "taxicab numbers".
The paradox seemed to imply that the very foundations of the whole of mathematics could no longer be trusted,
and that, even in mathematics, the truth could never be known absolutely (Gödel's and Turing's later work would
only make this worse). Russell's criticism was enough to rock Frege’s confidence in the entire edifice of logicism,
and he was gracious enough to admit this openly in a hastily written appendix to Volume II of his "Basic Laws of
Arithmetic".

A small part of the long proof that 1+1 =2 in the “Principia Mathematica”

Some idea of the scope and comprehensiveness of the “Principia” can be gleaned from the fact that it takes over
360 pages to prove definitively that 1 + 1 = 2. Today, it is widely considered to be one of the most important and
seminal works in logic since Aristotle's "Organon". It seemed remarkably successful and resilient in its ambitious
aims, and soon gained world fame for Russell and Whitehead. Indeed, it was only Gödel's 1931 incompleteness
theorem that finally showed that the “Principia” could not be both consistent and complete.

Among other things, Hilbert space can be used to study the harmonics of vibrating strings

Hilbert’s algorithm for space-filling curves

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

The incompleteness theorem - surely a mathematician’s worst nightmare - led to something of a crisis in the
mathematical community, raising the spectre of a problem which may turn out to be true but is still unprovable,
something which had not been even considered in the whole two millennia plus history of mathematie

Representation of a Turing Machine

During the 1930s, Turing recast incompleteness in terms of computers (or, more specifically, a theoretical device
that manipulates symbols, known as a Turing machine), replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal
language with this formal and simple device. He first proved that such a machine would be capable of performing
any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm. He then went on to show that,
even for such a logical machine, essentially driven by arithmetic, there would always be some problems they would
never be able to solve, and that a machine fed such a problem would never stop trying to solve it, but would never
succeed (known as the “halting problem”).
Turing test
Indeed, he was the first to address the problem of artificial intelligence, and proposed an experiment now known
as the Turing Test in an attempt to define a standard for a machine to be called "intelligent". By this test, a
computer could be said to "think" if it could fool a human interrogator into thinking that the conversation was with a
human. This showed remarkable foresight at a time long before the Internet, when the only available computers
were the size of a room and less powerful than a modern pocket calculator.

Weil was an early leader of the Bourbaki group who published many influential textbooks on modern mathematics

It was also at this time that he became a founding member, and the de facto early leader, of the so-called Bourbaki
group of French mathematicians. This influential group published many textbooks on advanced 20th Century
mathematics under the assumed name of Nicolas Bourbaki, in an attempt to give a unified description of all
mathematics founded on set theory. Bourbaki has the distinction of having been refused membership of the
American Mathematical Society for being non-existent (although he was a member of the Mathematical Society of
France!)

One of several alternative formulations of the Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms and Axiom of Choice

Matiyasevich-Stechkin visual sieve for prime numbers

Among, his other achievements, Matiyasevich and his colleague Boris Stechkin also developed an interesting
“visual sieve” for prime numbers, which effectively “crosses out” all the composite numbers, leaving only the primes.
He has a theorem on recursively enumerable sets named after him, as well as a polynomial related to the
colourings of triangulation of spheres. He is head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Logic at the St. Petersburg
Department of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences, and is a member of several
mathematical societies and boards.