Richard Dedekind's best known contribution is the definition of real numbers through the notion of Dedekind cut.
20 Facts About Richard Dedekind
2.
Richard Dedekind is considered a pioneer in the development of modern set theory and of the philosophy of mathematics known as Logicism.
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Richard Dedekind's mother was Caroline Henriette Dedekind, the daughter of a professor at the Collegium.
4.
Richard Dedekind was born in Braunschweig, which is where he lived most of his life and died.
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Richard Dedekind first attended the Collegium Carolinum in 1848 before transferring to the University of Gottingen in 1850.
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Gauss was still teaching, although mostly at an elementary level, and Richard Dedekind became his last student.
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Richard Dedekind received his doctorate in 1852, for a thesis titled Uber die Theorie der Eulerschen Integrale.
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Richard Dedekind returned to Gottingen to teach as a Privatdozent, giving courses on probability and geometry.
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Richard Dedekind studied for a while with Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, and they became good friends.
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Richard Dedekind retired in 1894, but did occasional teaching and continued to publish.
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Richard Dedekind never married, instead living with his sister Julia.
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Richard Dedekind was elected to the Academies of Berlin and Rome, and to the French Academy of Sciences.
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Richard Dedekind received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oslo, Zurich, and Braunschweig.
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Richard Dedekind published his thoughts on irrational numbers and Richard Dedekind cuts in his pamphlet "Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen" ; in modern terminology, Vollstandigkeit, completeness.
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Richard Dedekind defined two sets to be "similar" when there exists a one-to-one correspondence between them.
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Richard Dedekind invoked similarity to give the first precise definition of an infinite set: a set is infinite when it is "similar to a proper part of itself," in modern terminology, is equinumerous to one of its proper subsets.
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Richard Dedekind edited the collected works of Lejeune Dirichlet, Gauss, and Riemann.
18.
Richard Dedekind proposed an axiomatic foundation for the natural numbers, whose primitive notions were the number one and the successor function.
19.
The next year, Giuseppe Peano, citing Richard Dedekind, formulated an equivalent but simpler set of axioms, now the standard ones.
20.
In 1872, while on holiday in Interlaken, Richard Dedekind met Georg Cantor.