Imre Tóth (philosopher)

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Imre Tóth , actually Imre Roth (born December 26, 1921 in Satu Mare ; † May 11, 2010 in Paris ) was a Romanian-German mathematician , philosopher and classical philologist . Vittorio Hösle describes him as one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century. He taught history of science at the University of Regensburg .

Life

Imre Tóth was born into a Hungarian-Jewish family in Romania . He changed his name to Tóth during the Holocaust that killed his parents. The father had fought on the side of Austria-Hungary in World War I and was “thoroughly Germanophile”.

Paradoxically, Tóth survived the Holocaust (as the only one of his family) because he was in the resistance and had been sentenced to prison: the Jewish prison inmates were to be deported later than the rest of the Jewish population. On June 6, 1944, he was taken to a train with other inmates. Shortly before departure, a Hungarian officer stopped the train because the Allies had landed in Normandy and the officer considered the war to be lost; the inmates were returned to the prison.

After the Second World War , Toth studied mathematics and philosophy and taught philosophy and history of mathematics in Bucharest from 1949 to 1968 . Because he had made positive comments about the Hungarian uprising, he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1958 and then hampered in his career. In the early 1970s he fled to Germany, where he was visiting professor in Frankfurt am Main from 1969 to 1971 and then in Bochum. In 1971 he was appointed full professor for general history of science at the University of Regensburg . In 1990 he retired and then lived in Paris . He was visiting scholar at the École normal supérieure and at the Institute for Advanced Study .

Hösle writes about his work: "Imre Tóth continued the important German tradition of ancient mathematical history at the highest level, precisely because he was not only a philologist, but also a philosopher." Aristotle “presupposed that the Greeks had knowledge of non-Euclidean geometries , ie geometries in which the sum of the angles in the triangle deviates from 180 degrees. He also relied on an analysis of the structure of the elements of Euclid. He published a popular science article in Scientific American about it as early as 1969 and also dealt with the effects of knowledge of non-Euclidean geometries in philosophy and theology. Another focus of Tóth's work was Zenon's paradoxes on the concept of the continuum .

The estate is in the Regensburg University Archives . It contains extensive correspondence with numerous scientists from all over the world and some original manuscripts from the early days of his work.

Honors

Publications (selection)

  • Fragments and traces of non-Euclidean geometry in Aristotle , contributions to antiquity, volume 280, Berlin-New York 2010 (foreword by Vittorio Hösle) (reviews on this in the Zentralblatt der Mathematik [Engl.] By Victor Pambuccian and in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review by Wilfried Lingenberg )
  • The problem of parallels in the Corpus Aristotelicum , "Archive for History of Exact Science", 3 (1967), 249-422
  • La geometria non euclidea prima di Euclide , in: "Le Scienze", January 1970 (translation from Scientific American: Non-euclidean geometry before Euclid , volume 221, November 1969);
  • Geometria "more ethico". The alternative: Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry in Aristotle and the foundations of Euclidean geometry in AA.VV., Prismata: Naturwissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien , Festschrift for Willy Hartner, ed. by Yasukatsu Maeyama and Walter Gabriel Saltzer, Wiesbaden 1977, 395-415
  • The non-Euclidean geometry in the "Phenomenology of Spirit": epistemological considerations on the history of the development of mathematics , Frankfurt am Main 1972
  • La revolution non euclidienne in: La recherche en histoire des sciences , Paris 1983
  • Mathematical philosophy and Hegelian dialectics in: Hegel and the natural sciences , ed. by Michael John Petry, Stuttgart 1987, 89-182
  • Essere e non essere: il teorema induttivo di Saccheri e la sua rilevanza ontologica , in: Conoscenza e matematica, a cura di Lorenzo Magnani, Milano 1991
  • The Dialectical Structure of Zeno's Arguments , in: Hegel and Newtonianism , ed. By Michael John Petry, Dordrecht 1993, 179-200
  • I paradossi di Zenone nel "Parmenide" di Platone , Naples 1994
  • Aristotle ei fondamenti assiomatici della geometria. Prolegomeni alla comprensione dei frammenti non-euclidei nel "Corpus Aristotelicum", nel loro contesto matematico e filosofico , Vita e Pensiero, Milano 1997 (review of the second edition in the Zentralblatt der Mathematik ; PDF file; 62 kB [English]))
  • God and Geometry: A Victorian Controversy , in: Dieter Henrich (editor), evolution theory and its evolution , series of publications of the University of Regensburg, Volume 7, 1982, 141-204.
  • La filosofia della matematica di Frege. Una restaurazione filosofica, una controrivoluzione scientifica, a cura di Teodosio Orlando, Macerata 2015
  • Il lungo cammino da me a me . Interviste di Péter Várdy. Translated by Francesca Ervas, Macerata 2016

literature

  • Vittorio Hösle : Mysterium Mathematik: Polyglott: On the death of the scientist Imre Tóth , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung May 15, 2010, page 39

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Vittorio Hösle: Mysterium Mathematik: Polyglott: To the death of the scientist Imre Tóth, in: FAZ May 15, 2010
  2. ↑ Biographical information based on the foreword by Hösle in Tóth Fragments and Traces of Non-Euclidean Geometry in Aristoteles , De Gruyter 2010
personal data
SURNAME Tóth, Imre
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roth, Imre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian-German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Satu Mare
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 2010
Place of death Paris