Simply Frege Gottlob

By: Tramil Duff

About Frege Gottlob

• Frege was a German mathematician, logician ,and a philosopher. Was born on November 8 1848 in Wismar in a town named Mecklenburg-Schwerin. After attending the local Gymnasium for 15 years He enrolled at the University of Jena. There he attended lectures by Ernst Karl Abbe whom eventually became his mentor and had an significant intellectual impact on his life.

Ernst Abbe & Frege Gottlob

• Frege Gottlob studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, and philosophy. At the university Jena in his five semesters there.

• Ernest Abbe encouraged Frege to transfer to Gottingen to complete his studies.

• In 1907 he was awarded the honorable title of Hofrat(councilor).

• Frege’s publication of the Begriffsschrift (conceptual writing) is regarded in the early twenty-first century as “the single most important event in the development of modern logic.

Frege’s logic and philosophy & Mathematics

• The german mathematician provided foundations for the modern discipline of logic.

• He did this by developing: (a) a system allowing one to study inferences formally, (b) an analysis of complex sentences and quantifier phrases that showed an underlying unity to certain classes of inferences, (c) an analysis of proof and definition, (d) a theory of extensions which

• though seriously flawed, offered an intriguing picture of the foundations of mathematics, (e) an analysis of statements about number (i.e., of answers to the question ‘How many?’), (f) definitions and proofs of some of the basic axioms of number theory from a limited set of logically primitive concepts and axioms, and (g) a conception of logic as a discipline which has some compelling features. We discuss these developments in the following subsections.

Puzzles Identity Statements

Frege believed that statements all have the form ‘A=b’, where ‘ A and b’ are either names or descriptions that denote individuals. He naturally assumed that a sentence of the form ‘a=b’ is true if and only if the object a just is or is identical to the object b.

Example: 110+111

The sentence ‘110+111 = 221’ is true if and only if the number 110+111 just is the number 221.

The End