Mathematics is a field of study that investigates topics such as number, space, structure, and change.

Philosophy

Nature

  • Definitions of mathematics – Mathematics has no generally accepted definition. Different schools of thought, particularly in philosophy, have put forth radically different definitions, all of which are controversial.
  • Language of mathematics is the system used by mathematicians to communicate mathematical ideas among themselves, and is distinct from natural languages in that it aims to communicate abstract, logical ideas with precision and unambiguity.[1]
  • Philosophy of mathematics – its aim is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of mathematics in people's lives.
  • Classical mathematics refers generally to the mainstream approach to mathematics, which is based on classical logic and ZFC set theory.
  • Constructive mathematics asserts that it is necessary to find (or "construct") a mathematical object to prove that it exists. In classical mathematics, one can prove the existence of a mathematical object without "finding" that object explicitly, by assuming its non-existence and then deriving a contradiction from that assumption.
  • Predicative mathematics

Mathematics is

  • An academic discipline – branch of knowledge that is taught at all levels of education and researched typically at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined (in part), and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties to which their practitioners belong.
  • A formal science – branch of knowledge concerned with the properties of formal systems based on definitions and rules of inference. Unlike other sciences, the formal sciences are not concerned with the validity of theories based on observations in the physical world.

Concepts

  • Abstraction the process of extracting the underlying structures, patterns or properties of a mathematical concept, removing any dependence on real world objects with which it might originally have been connected, and generalizing it so that it has wider applications or matching among other abstract descriptions of equivalent phenomena.

Branches and subjects

Quantity

  • Elementary arithmetic is the part of arithmetic which deals with basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
  • Modular arithmetic is a system of arithmetic for integers, where numbers "wrap around" when reaching a certain value, called the modulus.
  • Second-order arithmetic is a collection of axiomatic systems that formalize the natural numbers and their subsets.
  • Peano axioms also known as the Dedekind–Peano axioms or the Peano postulates, are axioms for the natural numbers presented by the 19th century Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano.
  • Floating-point arithmetic is arithmetic using formulaic representation of real numbers as an approximation to support a trade-off between range and precision.

Structure

Space

Change

Foundations and philosophy

Mathematical logic

Discrete mathematics

Applied mathematics

History

Regional history

Subject history

Psychology

Influential mathematicians

See Lists of mathematicians.

Mathematical notation

Classification systems

Journals and databases

  • Mathematical Reviews – journal and online database published by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) that contains brief synopses (and occasionally evaluations) of many articles in mathematics, statistics and theoretical computer science.
  • Zentralblatt MATH – service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, published by Springer Science+Business Media. It is a major international reviewing service which covers the entire field of mathematics. It uses the Mathematics Subject Classification codes for organizing their reviews by topic.

See also

References

Bibliography

Citations

  1. Bogomolny, Alexander. "Mathematics Is a Language". www.cut-the-knot.org. Retrieved 2017-05-19.

Notes

  1. For a partial list of objects, see Mathematical object.
  2. See Object and Abstract and concrete for further information on the philosophical foundations of objects.
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