Gottlob FregeBorn 8 Nov 1848; died 26 Jul 1925 at age 76. Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician and logician who founded modern symbolic logic and was the first to show mathematics as actually an extension of logic. He extended Boole's work by inventing logical symbols (symbols for “or”, “if-then”, etc.) that improved on the syllogistic logic it replaced. He also worked on general questions of philosophical logic and semantics. His theory of meaning, based on makig a distinction between what a linguistic term refers to and what it expresses, is still influential. Frege tried to provide a rigorous foundation for mathematics on the basis of purely logical principles, but abandoned the attempt when Bertrand Russell, on whose work he had a profound influence, pointed out a paradox that made the system inconsistent. |
