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"Dialectical mathematism": Hu Shihua and the foundations of mathematics in 1950s China

Publication |
2016

Abstract

The paper describes the fate of mathematical logic and foundations of mathematics in the first decade of the Peoples Republic of China, when a Marxist philosophy and politics of science were imported to China from the Soviet Union, and due to the influence of which the above two were subsequently branded as idealism. It tells the story of how Hu Shihua, who was an important member of the community of Chinese mathematicians and one among the first members of Chinese Academy of Sciences to research exclusively on mathematical logic, played an important role in rehabilitation of mathematical logic and a Marxist reinvention of foundations of mathematics.

Furthermore, the paper also illustrates how the Soviet philosophy or ideology of mathematics influenced the above mentioned branches of mathematics in Chinese academic institutes as well as how a new path in philosophy of mathematics was taken after the strict Chinese emulation of Soviet politics of science faded away after 1956. Finally, the paper will show how, in the ""peak"" of this process, foundations of mathematics arose from the ashes of idealism to represent a crown theory and philosophy to supplement dialectical materialism and dialectics of nature in the realm of mathematics, thus forming a special "mathematized" dialectical materialism.