科技英语阅读Unit1.pdfVIP

Appendix I Reference Answers Unit 1 Mathematics Part I EST Reading Reading 1 Section A Pre-reading Task Warm-up Questions: Work in pairs and discuss the fo owing questions. 1. Who is Bertrand Russe ? Bertrand Arthur William Russell (b.1872 – d.1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His most influential contributions include his defense o logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic), his refining of the predicate calculus introduced by Gottlob Frege (which still forms the basis of most contemporary logic), his defense of neutral monism (the view that the world consists of just one type of substance that is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively physical), and his theories o definite descriptions and logical atomism. Russell is generally recognized as one o the founders o modern analytic philosophy, and is regularly credited with being one of the most important logicians of the twentieth century. 2. What is Russell’s Paradox? Russell discovered the paradox that bears his name in 1901, while working on his Principles of Mathematics (1903). The paradox arises in connection with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Such a set, if it exists, will be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member o itself. The paradox is significant since, using classical logic, all sentences are entailed by a contradiction. Russells discovery thus prompted a large amount of work in logic, set theory, and the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. 3. What effect did Russell’s Paradox have on Gottlob Fregg’s system? At first Frege observed that the consequences of Russell’s paradox are not immediately clear. For example, “Is it always permissible to speak of