Essay On Richard Dedekind

In 1831 in Brunswick, Germany, Richard Dedekind was born. He was the youngest of four children. At first Dedekind was pursuing the chemistry and physics, but the logic of physics didn’t make sense to him. So he changed focus to algebra, calculus, and geometry. He made this change at the center of science in Europe, Gottingen where he was going to school for collage. There he became friends and colleagues with a few famous mathematicians, like Gauss and Georg Riemann. Not much is known about why Dedekind decided to change his mind set, but it was probably at Gottingen where he took his first math class with Gauss, another mathematician, as the teacher. 50 years later he said he could still remember the lectures as the most beautiful ones he has heard.

He would then move to Switzerland for a job as a teacher, then return home to teach at the local university until he retired. He would stay in his hometown, after he retired, and would do almost all of the works that he is known for. He never married, and lived with one of his unmarried sisters for most of his later life. He came into contact with many other mathematicians, friends, foes, and rivals until he died in 1916. But the majority of his works created during his retirement did not get famous until after he died.

Richard Dedekind was famous for his redefinition of irrational numbers, as well as his analysis of the nature of number, his work on mathematical induction, the definition of finite and infinite sets, and his work in number theory, particularly on algebraic number fields. Before Dedekind came along there was no real definition for real numbers, continuity, and infinity. He also invented the Dedekind cut, naming it after himself of course. The Dedekind cut is a cut on ...

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...l. LXXIV of Creed’s journal. And taking that and what he knew he came up with “The way in which irrational numbers are usually introduced is connected with the concept of extensive magnitude and explains number as the results of the measurements of one such magnitude by another of the same kind. Instead I demand that arithmetic shall be developed out of itself (Dedekind 6).

Even though Richard Dedekind lived in Germany in the early 1800’s the concepts, ideas, and theorems effect us today, and sometimes we use them in everyday scenarios and don’t even realize it. Most likely we use the transitive property, or deductive reasoning, the most unconsciously, than any other thin Dedekind gave us. Although many people do not know who Richard Dedekind is he is one of the most important mathematician of all time, and definitely the best, and most ahead, in his time period.