3 ms·

Religious purposes? I'm curious to know what you meant specifically. Metaphysics?

• Alex3917 8y ago
  Geometry, calculus, set theory, etc.
  • gjm11 8y ago
    In what sense was all that done "for religious purposes"? The ancient Greeks developed a ton of geometry. I'm not sure how we could ever know for sure why they did it, but a clue might be in the name of the field: geo-metria, earth-measurement. (And it's known that some of them made use of geometry for practical purposes, or at least proposed doing so.) Newton (so far as I can tell) developed calculus in order to do physics. Neither arbitrary puzzle-solving nor religion (though I'm sure Newton enjoyed solving puzzles and he was a religious believer). Cantor certainly had some peculiar religious ideas that may have motivated his work on the beginnings of set theory. On the other hand, his first publication on the subject looks as if its goal is to provide a beautiful short proof of a theorem already proved by Liouville (on the existence of transcendental numbers); I suppose you could call that a "puzzle" on the grounds that everything in pure mathematics is puzzles, but I think Cantor would have viewed it as a practical application -- in the sense that it's useful for something else in mathematics. Puzzle-solving, perhaps, but not arbitrary puzzle-solving.