Timeline for Referring to the countability of $\Bbb Q$ as "Cantor's first diagonal argument"
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 6 at 18:02 | comment | added | LSpice | @NajibIdrissi, re, lost to the abyss of time, but not to the Wayback Machine: The hundred greatest theorems, as of the end of 2007. | |
| Jul 14, 2023 at 14:18 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila♦ | I have heard the terminology since my freshman year, in multiple countries, and often online from multiple sources. For the most part this is done by non-logicians and then gets parroted through the years over lecture notes or oblivious students helping or private tutoring. I agree with the voices here, this has always irked me, and it is a terrible and confusing terminology. | |
| Jul 13, 2023 at 16:16 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | @AndrejBauer : It's not the administrators that you will need to fight; it's those whose editing of German Wikipedia's mathematics article include this article. If you have the privilege of "moving" an article on German Wikipedia (i.e. editing its title) you can do that, and if you have the editing privileges shared by everyone who hasn't been banned from editing, then you can use that. You can also discuss this on the following page: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_Diskussion:Mathematik | |
| Jul 13, 2023 at 14:58 | history | edited | gmvh |
Added "terminology" tag
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| Jul 13, 2023 at 14:56 | comment | added | Andreas Blass | When I learned about Cantor's work (probably around 1960), "first" and "second" diagonal argument was the terminology I learned (in English). | |
| Jul 13, 2023 at 14:53 | comment | added | Andrej Bauer | So, who is going to fight the German Wikipedia administrators and get rid of the thing? | |
| Jul 13, 2023 at 14:50 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | I you go way back in time, the article was created in 2007, and the only reference at the time of creation was a page purportedly titled "The Hundred Greatest Theorems" and supposedly available at personal.stevens.edu/~nkahl/Top100Theorems.html But this was apparently lost to the abyss of time long ago. | |
| Jul 13, 2023 at 14:38 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | I honestly doubt the terminology is standard. Someone asked in the Wikipedia article's discussion page, in 2007 (!), whether anyone had any source that the argument is really called the diagonal argument. The only reference found was in a paper of Wittgenstein (who was a philosopher of mathematics, not a mathematician). He apparently didn't even call it the diagonal argument but the diagonal method. And I can't find the text of Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik Teil II to even confirm he actually called it that. | |
| Jul 13, 2023 at 14:36 | comment | added | Najib Idrissi | @JoelDavidHamkins How likely is it that these Google results were created because the authors read the Wikipedia article in the first place? (AKA citogenesis: xkcd.com/978) | |
| Jul 13, 2023 at 14:35 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | Google returns several instances: google.com/search?q=Cantor%27s+first+diagonal+argument. Personally, I find this bad terminology, since it invites a confusion with true diagonalization, a totally different idea. | |
| Jul 13, 2023 at 14:28 | history | asked | Tristan vd Vlugt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |