Axiomatic

This volume explores the many different meanings of the notion of the axiomatic method, offering an insightful historical and philosophical discussion about how these notions changed over the millennia.

Focusing methodologically on those historical aspects that are relevant to supporting intuition in axiomatic approaches to geometry, the book develops systematic and modern approaches to the three core aspects of axiomatic geometry: Euclidean, non-Euclidean and projective. Historically, axiomatic geometry marks the origin of formalized mathematical activity.

Winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature's Best Writing Award

Focusing methodologically on those historical aspects that are relevant to supporting intuition in axiomatic approaches to geometry, the book develops systematic and modern approaches to the three core aspects of axiomatic geometry: Euclidean, non-Euclidean and projective. Historically, axiomatic geometry marks the origin of formalized mathematical activity. It is in this discipline that most historically famous problems can be found, the solutions of which have led to various presently very active domains of research, especially in algebra. The recognition of the coherence of two-by-two contradictory axiomatic systems for geometry (like one single parallel, no parallel at all, several parallels) has led to the emergence of mathematical theories based on an arbitrary system of axioms, an essential feature of contemporary mathematics.

The book consists of two parts. Part I is an axiomatic frame for the K-theory for C*-algebras. Some central results of this theory are heaved to the status of axioms and the other results are then derived from these axioms. In Part II the author constructs an example for this axiomatic theory which generalizes the classical theory for C*-algebras.