NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND ITS ROLE IN RIEMANN'S MATHEMATICS

Umberto Bottazzini , Rossana Tazzioli (1)

1 LPP - Laboratoire Paul Painlevé - UMR 8524

— This paper sets out to examine some of Riemann's papers and notes left by him, in the light of the " philosophical " standpoint expounded in his writings on Naturphilosophie. There is some evidence that many of Riemann's works, including his Habilitationsvortrag of 1854 on the foundations of geometry, may have sprung from his attempts to find a unified explanation for natural phenomena, on the basis of his model of the ether.

Mots clés: ether theory; complex function theory; Riemannian differential geometry

Domaines: Mathématiques [math]

Umberto Bottazzini, Rossana Tazzioli. NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND ITS ROLE IN RIEMANN'S MATHEMATICS. Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques, 1995. ⟨hal-01436900⟩