Steve Greenleaf

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from the acknowledged masters of logic, the Greek mathematicians. Of course, their concern was mostly for deductive logic, since their achievement was to organize mathematics as a system of theorems deductively derived from axioms. But one cannot pursue mathematics with deductive logic alone; before a theorem has been proved, and even before the proof has been seriously attempted, the mathematician has reason to think the theorem might be true, so that effort expended on the attempted proof may be worthwhile.8 The ancient Greeks began the tradition, which modern mathematicians have continued, ...more
The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal
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