Ernst Schröder

Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ernst Schröder (25 November 1841 in Mannheim, Baden, Germany – 16 June 1902 in Karlsruhe, Germany) was a German mathematician mainly known for his work on algebraic logic. He is a major figure in the history of mathematical logic.

Ernst Schröder

Quotes

• [My aim is] to design logic as a calculating discipline, especially to give access to the exact handling of relative concepts, and, from then on, by emancipation from the routine claims of natural language, to withdraw any fertile soil from "cliché" in the field of philosophy as well. This should prepare the ground for a scientific universal language that, widely differing from linguistic efforts like Volapük [a universal language like Esperanto, very popular in Germany at the time], looks more like a sign language than like a sound language.
  • In: V. Peckhaus, "19th Century Logic between Philosophy and Mathematics," Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 5 (1999), 433-450.

Quotes about Ernst Schröder

• When I started to trace the later development of logic, the first thing I did was to look at Schröder's Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, ...[whose] third volume is on the logic of relations (Algebra und Logik der Relative, 1895). The three volumes immediately became the best-known advanced logic text, and embody what any mathematician interested in the study of logic should have known, or at least have been acquainted with, in the 1890s.
  While, to my knowledge, no one except Frege ever published a single paper in Frege's notation, many famous logicians adopted Peirce-Schröder notation, and famous results and systems were published in it. Löwenheim stated and proved the Löwenheim theorem (later reproved and strengthened by Thoralf Skolem, whose name became attached to it together with Löwenheim's) in Peircian notation. In fact, there is no reference in Löwenheim's paper to any logic other than Peirce's. To cite another example, Zermelo presented his axioms for set theory in Peirce-Schröder notation, and not, as one might have expected, in Russell-Whitehead notation.
  • Hilary Putnam (1982) "Peirce the Logician," Historia Mathematica 9: 290–301.