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Frege was born in Wismar. He started studying at the University of Jena in 1869 and moved to Göttingen after two years, where he received his Ph.D. in 1873. After returning to JenaSee also Jena, Louisiana, United States. Jena is a city in central Germany on the River Saale in Thuringia. Its population is 101,325 (as of 30 June 2003). History On October 14, 1806 Napoleon fought and defeated the Prussian army here ( Battle of Jena-Au two years later, he became lecturer of mathematics. In 1879Events January January 11 Anglo-Zulu War begins January 22 Zulu troops massacre British troops at the Battle of Isandlwana. At Rorke's Drift, outnumbered British soldiers drive the attackers away after hours of fighting. February February 12 At New York C, he was made associate professor and in 1896Events January 4 Utah is admitted as the 45th U. January 5 An Austrian newspaper reports that Wilhelm Rontgen discovered a type of radiation later known as X-rays. January 12 H. Smith takes the first X-ray photograph. January 18 The X-ray machine is exhib became professor of mathematics. He died in Bad Kleinen in 1925.
Frege is widely regarded as the greatest logician since AristotleAristotle ( Greek Αριστοτλης Aristotelēs) ( 384 BCE March 7, 322 BCE) was a Greek scientist and philosopher. Along with Plato, he is often considered to be one of the two most influential philo. His revolutionary BegriffsschriftBegriffsschrift is the name of a book on logic by Gottlob Frege published in 1879. The name Begriffsschrift is usually translated as concept writing or concept notation the full title of the book identifies it as "a formula language, modelled on that of a, or Concept Script from 1879Events January January 11 Anglo-Zulu War begins January 22 Zulu troops massacre British troops at the Battle of Isandlwana. At Rorke's Drift, outnumbered British soldiers drive the attackers away after hours of fighting. February February 12 At New York C marked the beginning of a new epoch in the history of logic by displacing the old Term Logic that had held sway virtually unchanged since Aristotle. The Begriffsschrift was ground-breaking, and made contributions that are nowadays ubiquitous in mathematics, such as the use of quantificationIn language and logic, quantification is a construct that specifies the extent of validity of a predicate, that is the extent to which a predicate holds over a range of things. A language element which generates a quantification is called a quantifier ., which solved the medieval problem of multiple generality, and a clean treatment of functions and variables.
Frege was the first to devise an axiomatization of propositional logic and of predicate logic, the latter of which was his own invention. The quantification so essential to Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, and to Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, was also due to Frege. His work was largely unrecognized in his own day, and his ideas spread chiefly through those he influenced, particularly Giuseppe Peano and Russell. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Edmund Husserl were among the other philosophical notables strongly influenced by Frege.
Frege is regarded as one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, due to his deeply systematic contributions to the philosophy of language, most fundamentally his function-argument analysis of the proposition, his distinction between the sense and reference of a proper name (Eigenname), his distinction between concept and object, and his advancement of the context principle . He corresponded with many leading logicians and philosophers of his time, such as Max Schroeder , and Edmund Husserl.
Frege was the first major proponent of logicism -- the view that mathematics is reducible to logic. His Grundgesetze der Arithmetik was an attempt to explicitly derive the laws of arithmetic from logic. After the first volume was published (at the author's expense), Russell discovered the paradox which bears his name, and that the axioms of the Grundgesetze led to this contradiction; he wrote to Frege, who acknowledged the contradiction in an appendix to volume two of the Grundgesetze, noting what he perceived to be the faulty axiom. Frege never did manage to amend his axioms to his satisfaction, however; and after Frege's death, Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems showed that Frege's logicist program was impossible.
Despite this, and despite the generosity of Bertrand Russell's praise for Frege, he remained an obscure figure through his lifetime; had it not been for his influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein --of whom both major works, the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, revolved around a coming to terms with Frege's ideas about logic and language-- Frege's worth as a philosopher may never have been recognised.
Leading authorities on Frege include Michael Dummett, Günther Patzig , Hans Sluga , and Terence Parsons.