Subject: Re: [HM] Caratheodory, Klein & Grassman
From: Bill Everdell (Everdell@aol.com)
Date: Mon Mar 20 2000 - 10:45:46 EST
In a message dated 3/19/00 9:11:01 PM, conway@math.Princeton.EDU writes:
<<Klein tells the story in his "Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced
Standpoint", and I think in more detail somewhere else (perhaps in one of his
letters?).>>
Many thanks.
<<I don't think it has any relevance to the Ausdehnungslehre. That turns up
in the important references you mention because it was a very important
book.>>
No argument on the _Ausdehnungslehre_'s importance (which seems to grow with
every mathematical innovation I look at in the period 1872-1913), but that
importance was not recognized when Grassmann published it in 1844. So, it
had occurred to me that, given the book's "geometrization" of so much of then
current mathematics, the relative clout given to geometry with respect to
algebra and arithmetic in German schools in the generation between
Grassmann's and Frege's might help explain the book's circuitously
extra-academic fate. I assume that _Lineale Ausdehnungslehre_ was reviewed
when it first came out, and perhaps again when it was enlarged in 1862, and
(now that John Conway has given me a second excuse to waddle over to NYU's
Courant Institute library) I shall go and find out; but I would appreciate
anyone's help on where to look.
Bill Everdell, Brooklyn
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