Purity as a value in the German-speaking area

Abstract

In the early 20th century, the image of mathematics as a pure discipline, fully autonomous from anything else, and in fact hardly comparable with ‘the sciences’, was well established within and without the maths community. We shall here consider three different settings or periods and look at different meanings and implications of purity as a value: the rise of purism around 1800–1850; the search for balance and unity [Einheitlichkeit] in Klein’s Göttingen, 1890–1914; the extremist modernism of the 1920s and 30s and some of its versions of purity.