Dirk van Dalen
Brouwer's first program. How not to start a revolution
Abstract: In 1907 Brouwer defended his dissertation at the University of Amsterdam. It contains two major topics: Lie groups and Foundations of mathematics. I will concentrate on the second one. First a brief look at the development of young Brouwer is taken. We will see how his earlier mystical monograph, Life, Art and Mysticism, contains germs of his later work, and how his PhD. advisor tried to keep him from straying too far from the path of mathematics. We will also analyse some of his views in the dissertation, and try to trace them both in the past and the future. In essence his ideas were all there in 1907, but it took some ten more years for him to sort them out properly. Starting from the ur-intuition, he reached the mature program with choice sequences in 1916/17. In 1918 his second program could start the real revolution.
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