Presentation to the panel, “Does mathematics need new axioms?”

The point of departure for this panel is a somewhat controversial paper that I published in the American Mathematical Monthly under the title “Does mathematics need new axioms?” [4]. The paper itself was based on a lecture that I gave in 1997 to a joint session of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and it was thus written for a general mathematical audience. Basically, it was intended as an assessment of Gödel’s program for new axioms that he had advanced most prominently in his 1947 paper for the Monthly, entitled “What is Cantor’s continuum problem?” [7]. My paper aimed to be an assessment of that program in the light of research in mathematical logic in the intervening years, beginning in the 1960s, but especially in more recent years. In my presentation here I shall be following [4] in its main points, though enlarging on some of them. Some passages are even taken almost verbatim from that paper where convenient, though of course all expository background material that was necessary there for a general audience is omitted. For a logical audience I have written before about various aspects of the questions dealt with here, most particularly in the article “Gödel’s program for new axioms: Why, where, how and what?” [2] and prior to that in “Infinity in mathematics. Is Cantor necessary?”(reprinted as Chs. 2 and 12 in [3]).