About a month after his 83rd birthday Raphael Robinson was almost wholly incapacitated by a massive stroke, and 8 weeks later, on January 27, 1995, he died of ensuing complications. Mathematics was his life. He was always working on problems—those brought to him in journals or by colleagues, and others that he invented. Just three days before his death he received word that a paper of his, originating in a published problem, was accepted for publication. His 64 publications spanned a (...) full 6 decades, and included significant papers on number theory, combinatorics, complex analysis, and geometry, in addition to logic and set theory.Robinson was born on November 2, 1911, in National City, California. He came to Berkeley to study mathematics, obtaining an A.B. in 1932, an M.A. in 1933, and his Ph.D. in December, 1934. His dissertation was in complex analysis. He took 12 graduate courses in a variety of fields, but not one was close to logic or set theory—which was later the setting of about a quarter of his publications.After completing his studies Robinson served as Instructor for two years at Brown University, then returned for good to Berkeley in 1937, reaching the rank of full Professor in 1949. He taught a great variety of courses and was known as an excellent teacher, but was most interested in problemsolving and research and in 1972, at age 61, he elected early retirement, at considerable financial sacrifice, in order to concentrate on these pursuits. (shrink)

Consider a variant of the usual story about the iterative conception of sets. As usual, at every stage, you find all the (bland) sets of objects which you found earlier. But you also find the result of tapping any earlier-found object with any magic wand (from a given stock of magic wands). -/- By varying the number and behaviour of the wands, we can flesh out this idea in many different ways. This paper's main Theorem is that any loosely constructive (...) way of fleshing out this idea is synonymous with a ZF-like theory. -/- This Theorem has rich applications; it realizes John Conway's (1976) Mathematicians' Liberation Movement; and it connects with a lovely idea due to Alonzo Church (1974). (shrink)

Hilary Putnam once suggested that “the actual existence of sets as ‘intangible objects’ suffers… from a generalization of a problem first pointed out by Paul Benacerraf… are sets a kind of function or are functions a sort of set?” Sadly, he did not elaborate; my aim, here, is to do so on his behalf. There are well-known methods for treating sets as functions and functions as sets. But these do not raise any obvious philosophical or foundational puzzles. For that, we (...) first need to provide a full-fledged function theory. I supply such a theory: it axiomatizes the iterative notion of function in exactly the same sense that ZF axiomatizes the iterative notion of set. Indeed, this function theory is synonymous with ZF. It might seem that set theory and function theory present us with rival foundations for mathematics, since they postulate different ontologies. But appearances are deceptive. Set theory and function theory provide the very same judicial foundation for mathematics. They do not supply rival metaphysical foundations; indeed, if they supply metaphysical foundations at all, then they supply the very same metaphysical foundations. (shrink)

In this paper some of the history of the development of arithmetic in set theory is traced, particularly with reference to the problem of avoiding the assumption of an infinite set. Although the standard method of singling out a sequence of sets to be the natural numbers goes back to Zermelo, its development was more tortuous than is generally believed. We consider the development in the light of three desiderata for a solution and argue that they can probably not all (...) be satisfied simultaneously. (shrink)

One of the most important contributions of A. Church to logic is his invention of the lambda calculus. We present the genesis of this theory and its two major areas of application: the representation of computations and the resulting functional programming languages on the one hand and the representation of reasoning and the resulting systems of computer mathematics on the other hand.

This article serves to present a large mathematical perspective and historical basis for the Axiom of Replacement as well as to affirm its importance as a central axiom of modern set theory.