The revolution of 1907 – Brouwer’s dissertation

Abstract

Brouwer’s dissertation contains both the germs of his topological and his foundational work. We concentrate here on the latter. The extraordinary rich thesis contains comments and critique on his contemporaries, and a novel approach to many foundational issues. Between the lines one finds the genesis of the continuum and the natural numbers via the ur-intuition, the constructive interpretation of logic, choice sequences, and a precise discussion of the language, logic, and mathematics levels. The present paper provides a survey of the material and comments on Brouwer’s innovations.