Abstract
Much of what went under the name ‘number theory’ in the twentieth century had little to do with the natural numbers. There was an obsession with results concerning abstract structures used to prove results concerning abstract structures. It was as if carpenters were using their tools to make new tools to make new tools — without ever using any of these tools to build a house. Happily, there were exceptions. A few number theorists escaped the obsession with abstraction and produced the meaningful concrete results listed below.
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Notes
R. Kanigel, The Man who Knew Infinity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), pages 7 and 282.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Anglin, W.S. (1994). Twentieth-Century Number Theory. In: Mathematics: A Concise History and Philosophy. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0875-4_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0875-4_40
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