I just came across a reference to the work of the philosopher of mathematics Hartry Field. This is what Wikipedia has to say:

Fictionalism was introduced in 1980 when Hartry Field published Science Without Numbers, which rejected and in fact reversed Quine’s indispensability argument. Where Quine suggested that mathematics was indispensable for our best scientific theories, and therefore should be accepted as true, Field suggested that mathematics was dispensable, and therefore should be rejected as false. He did this by giving a complete axiomatization of Newtonian mechanics that didn’t reference numbers or functions at all. He started with the “betweenness” axioms of Hilbert geometry to characterize space without coordinatizing it, and then added extra relations between points to do the work formerly done by vector fields.

Does anyone know if that is an accurate summary of Field’s argument? It seems obviously wrong to me.

Via Crooked Timber.

The latest issue of the Bulletin of the AMS is out. The feature article is Expander graphs and their applications by Hoory, Linial, and Wigderson. Expander graphs are a kind of graph that are important in computational complexity theory; we discussed them once before. Y.S. Sinai, a mathematician who works on topics quite close to physics, has an interesting article on the cultural differences called Mathematicians and physicists = cats and dogs?.

I was reading Hilton and Stammbach’s A Course in Homological Algebra, when I spotted this rather forlorn passage:

Of course, if A is free, Ext(A,Z) = 0, but it is still an open question whether, for all abelian groups A, Ext(A,Z) = 0 implies A free.

It is forlorn because we now know that we’ll never know: this is the Whitehead problem, and in 1973 Saharon Shelah proved that it is independent of the axioms of set theory.