Alessandro Padoa (14 October 1868, Venice Italy - 25 November 1937, Genoa Italy) was an Italian mathematician and logician, a contributor to the school of Giuseppe Peano.[1] He is remembered for a method for deciding whether, given some formal theory. a new primitive notion is truly independent of the other primitive notions. There is an analogous problem in axiomatic theories, namely deciding whether a given axiom is independent of the other axioms. Padoa's address to the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians was the first clear and unconfused exposition of the modern axiomatic method in mathematics, "the first … to get all the ideas concerning defined and undefined concepts completely straight".[2]

References

1. ^ Smith 2000, p. 49
2. ^ Smith 2000, p. 46–47

Bibliography

* 1900. "Logical introduction to any deductive theory" in Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931. Harvard Univ. Press: 118-23.

Secondary:

* Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.
* Suppes, Patrick, 1999 (1957). Introduction to Logic. Dover. Discusses "Padoa's method."

* Smith, James T. (2000), Methods of Geometry, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0471251836

External links

* O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Alessandro Padoa", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Padoa.html .