Content about “

axiom

”

How would you explain the natural numbers to an alien devoid of a number instinct? You could try Peano arithmetic...

In the 1930s the logician Kurt Gödel showed that if you set out proper rules for mathematics, you lose the ability to decide whether certain statements are true or false. This is rather shocking and you may wonder why Gödel's result hasn't wiped out mathematics once and for all. The answer is that, initially at least, the unprovable statements logicians came up with were quite contrived. But are they about to enter mainstream mathematics?

Human versus machine: who's better at proving theorems?

What's the nature of infinity? Are all infinities the same? And what happens if you've got infinitely many infinities? In this article Richard Elwes explores how these questions brought triumph to one man and ruin to another, ventures to the limits of mathematics and finds that, with infinity, you're spoilt for choice.

Richard Elwes continues his investigation into Cantor and Cohen's work. He investigates the continuum hypothesis, the question that caused Cantor so much grief.

Runner up in the general public category. Great minds spark controversy. This is something you'd expect to hear about a great philosopher or artist, but not about a mathematician. Get ready to bin your stereotypes as Rebecca Morris describes some controversial ideas of the great mathematician David Hilbert.

Robert Hunt concludes our Origins of Proof series by asking what a proof really is, and how we know that we've actually found one. One for the philosophers to ponder...

For millennia, puzzles and paradoxes have forced mathematicians to continually rethink their ideas of what proofs actually are. Jon Walthoe explains the tricks involved and how great thinkers like Pythagoras, Newton and Gödel tackled the problems.

Starting in this issue, PASS Maths is pleased to present a series of articles about proof and logical reasoning. In this article we give a brief introduction to deductive reasoning and take a look at one of the earliest known examples of mathematical proof.