Mathematics and Dialectics in the Soviet Union: The Pre-Stalin Period

Abstract

During the 1920s, Soviet Marxist theorists paid less attention to developments in mathematics in their own country than to various manifestations of "mathematical idealism" in the West. Their criticism concentrated on set-theoretical studies, the theory of probability, mathematical logic, and the foundations of mathematics. Because of their disunity, the Marxist scholars did not present an obstacle to the work of mathematicians, dominated by the much-heralded Moscow school of mathematics, strong in the theory of functions of a real variable and its applications to topology and several other branches of mathematics. The end of the decade was marked by the beginning of Stalinist pressure to establish full ideological control over all branches of mathematics. © 1999 Academic Press.