Review of Practical Foundations of Mathematics
Peter Johnstone
Zentralblatt für Mathematik
In 1971, Carl Linderholm published a book entitled Mathematics
Made Difficult (Wolfe Publishing Ltd.; Zbl 217,1), in which he
attempted to satirize the way in which (as he saw it) `abstract
nonsense' was taking over the foundations of mathematics and making
them incomprehensible. Nearly 30 years later, Paul Taylor has finally
written the book of which Mathematics Made Difficult was a
parody. That is not intended as a criticism of Practical
Foundations of Mathematics; the reviewer has little sympathy with
Linderholm's rather heavy-handed `humour', and is of the opinion that
Taylor has written a splendid and highly enjoyable book. But the
parallel between the two books is inescapable.
Taylor's book is both didactic and descriptive: it attempts to explain
how mathematicians and informaticians (the latter being the author's
appealing term for theoretical computer scientists) should view the
foundations on which their work is based, but at the same time it
attempts to tease out the logical structure underpinning the informal
way in which mathematicians actually argue - both today and in
previous eras of history. It is this latter feature which makes it
very different from most books on the foundations of mathematics, but
at the same time brings it closer to Linderholm's satire. (To take two
examples, the detailed description of the history of the algorithm for
solving the general cubic equation, and its presentation as a program
in the semi-formal language developed by the author (p. 198), remind
one irresistibly of the tribulations of M. Boulangiaire in chapter 3
of Mathematics Made Difficult. And the author's concern for Bo
Peep's difficulties in counting her sheep, evidenced by Exercise 1.1
on p. 60, might have been lifted straight from Linderholm's discussion
of whether one can use the same number-system for adding and for
counting.)
Mention of exercises is a reminder that this book is, at least partly,
intended as a textbook. What sort of students could benefit from
courses based on it? The author's own suggestion is that `the first
three chapters should be accessible to final year undergraduates in
mathematics and informatics'; this is probably true, provided the
mathematics undergraduates have rather more familiarity with
programming languages (and the informaticians have more familiarity
with non-discrete mathematics) than is usual. (And both groups would
find the exercises pretty hard going.) It is, above all, beginning
graduate students in both disciplines who will find this book most
useful; it will prompt them to think seriously about the foundations
of their subjects, and the relations between them, in a way that no
other existing book (known to the reviewer) can achieve. Indeed, if it
succeeds in becoming widely used and quoted (as it deserves to do),
then it may bring about an altogether new level of understanding, by
each of the two groups, of the way in which the other group thinks
about the subject it studies.
At the heart of the book, not surprisingly, is category theory. It is
therefore a little unexpected not to find a chapter headed
`Introduction to Categories' or something of the sort; Chapter III on
posets and lattices is immediately followed by a chapter entitled
`Cartesian Closed Categories'. However, readers who are newcomers to
category theory should not despair: Chapter IV does largely consist of
an introduction to category theory (albeit a rather more condensed one
than that found in most textbooks on category theory), and this
together with Chapter V on `Limits and Colimits' will serve to
introduce such readers to all the important concepts of the subject
(except, rather oddly, for adjunctions, which are held back until
Chapter VII, although adjoint functors between posets have been
treated in Chapter III).
The author's other main theme is structural recursion, which forms the
title of Chapter VI but which, like the categorical notion of adjoint
functor, actually pervades the whole book. Chapter VI itself is a tour
of various aspects of recursive definitions: free algebras, the
general recursion theorem (formulated, in the style of Gerhard Osius,
as a theorem about well-founded coalgebras), tail recursion, and
Kuratowski-finiteness. But the thing which links all of these to each
other, and to the categorical ideas which are omnipresent in the
foundations of mathematics, is the notion of the syntactic category of
a theory and the syntax/semantics adjunction. These topics are covered
more fully in the last two chapters, which introduce the notions of
dependent types, fibrations and the categorical notion of
quantification. Although, in these later chapters, the going
inevitably gets tougher (as befits the subject-matter), the author's
style remains user-friendly without becoming imprecise: a student who
works through to the end of the book will (rightly) feel a real sense
of achievement, but there is no reason why he shouldn't get there if
he perseveres.
The book's collection of references is splendidly eclectic; Taylor is
extremely good at pointing out the (sometimes surprising) sources of
ideas that most of us take for granted, and at finding apposite
quotations to support his argument. Indeed, the reviewer suspects that
many readers will gain more enjoyment from reading the footnotes than
they do from the text of this book. (The reviewer's favourite
footnote, a rare unattributed example, is on page 192.) Taylor's
insistence on spelling out the forenames of cited authors, whenever he
knows them, may at first seem irritating to a reader brought up on the
tradition of initials-plus-surname, but one soon gets used to
it. Indeed, by the time one reaches the Bibliography, one is tempted
to wonder what crimes Godfrey Harold Hardy can have committed in
Taylor's eyes, to cause him to be reduced to `G.H.'. (In this respect,
if in no other, Taylor's book is inferior to Linderholm's!)
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