Raymond Louis Wilder

Raymond Louis Wilder (3 November 1896, Palmer, Massachusetts – 7 July 1982, Santa Barbara, California) was an American mathematician, who specialized in topology and gradually acquired philosophical and anthropological interests.

Biography

During the 1940s, Wilder met and befriended the University of Michigan anthropologist Leslie White, whose professional curiosity included mathematics as a human activity (White 1947). This encounter proved fateful, and Wilder's research interests underwent a major change, towards the foundations of mathematics.

Wilder's Evolution of mathematical concepts. An elementary study (1969) proposed that "we study mathematics as a human artifact, as a natural phenomenon subject to empirical observation and scientific analysis, and, in particular, as a cultural phenomenon understandable in anthropological terms." In this book, Wilder wrote:

"The major difference between mathematics and the other sciences, natural and social, is that whereas the latter are directly restricted in their purview by environmental phenomena of a physical or social nature, mathematics is subject only indirectly to such limitations. ... Plato conceived of an ideal universe in which resided perfect models ... the only reality mathematical concepts have is as cultural elements or artifacts."

Wilder's last book, Mathematics as a cultural system (1981), contained yet more thinking in this anthropological and evolutionary vein.

See also

• Foundations of mathematics
• Topology

External links

• Raymond Louis Wilder @ Wikipedia