Zermelo's Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence

This book grew out of my interest in what is common to three disciplines: mathematics, philosophy, and history. The origins of Zermelo's Axiom of Choice, as well as the controversy that it engendered, certainly lie in that intersection. Since the time of Aristotle, mathematics has been concerned alternately with its assumptions and with the objects, such as number and space, about which those assumptions were made. In the historical context of Zermelo's Axiom, I have explored both the vagaries and the fertility of this alternating concern. Though Zermelo's research has provided the focus for this book, much of it is devoted to the problems from which his work originated and to the later developments which, directly or indirectly, he inspired.

The Axiom of Choice is the most controversial axiom in the entire history of mathematics. Yet it remains a crucial assumption not only in set theory but equally in modern algebra, analysis, mathematical logic, and topology (often under the name Zorn's Lemma). This treatment is the only full-length history of the axiom in English, and is much more complete than the two other books on the subject, one in French and the other in Russian. This book covers the Axiom's prehistory of implicit uses in the 19th century, its explicit formulation by Zermelo in 1904, the firestorm of controversy that it caused — in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the U.S. — its role in stimulating his axiomatization of set theory in 1908, and its proliferating uses all over mathematics throughout the 20th century.

The book is written so as to be accessible to the advanced mathematics undergraduate, but equally to be informative and stimulating to the professional mathematician. Most technical terms are defined in footnotes, making it accessible by students of the philosophy of mathematics as well.

This new edition has an expanded bibliography and a new preface examining developments since its original 1982 publication.