Mathematics, Language, and Philosophy

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will provide an introduction to topics at the intersection of mathematics, language, and philosophy. Our focus will be the examination of cross-disciplinary work undertaken by mathematicians and philosophers at the turn of the 20th century. This work largely focused on the reciprocal relationship between mathematics and language. On the one hand, philosophers like Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein used ideas from mathematics to understand the nature of meaning in natural language; on the other hand, mathematicians like Gödel, Tarski, and Turing used insights gleaned from thinking about mathematics as a kind of language to prove famous results in the foundations of math and computer science. Exploring this dual relationship will be the focus of this course.