Bernard Bolzano was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher and Catholic priest who lived from 1781 to 1848 and whose work gained wide recognition only after his death. He helped establish rigor in mathematical analysis through results including the epsilon delta definition of a limit and the first purely analytic proof of the intermediate value theorem. His 1837 book Wissenschaftslehre, or Theory of Science, set out an influential logical theory spanning epistemology and philosophy of science that later shaped both phenomenology and analytic philosophy through readers including Edmund Husserl and Kazimierz Twardowski.
Facts
FieldMathematics and philosophy 1 Notable WorkParadoxien des Unendlichen 1 Sources
1. Bolzano - MacTutor
Biography header, Born line
Born 5 October 1781 [Prague, Bohemia, Austrian Habsburg domain (now Czech Republic)]
Biography header, Died line
Died 18 December 1848 Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic)
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Bernard Bolzano successfully freed calculus from the concept of the infinitesimal. He also gave examples of 1-1 correspondences between the elements of an infinite set and the elements of a proper subset.
Biography text, paradoxes
His work on paradoxes _Paradoxien des Unendlichen_, a study of paradoxes of the infinite, was published in 1851, three years after his death, by one of his students.
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