Giuseppe Peano

Giuseppe Peano (1858 to 1932) was an Italian mathematician born on a farm near Cuneo who spent most of his career at the University of Turin. He is remembered as a founder of symbolic logic and of the modern foundations of mathematics. In 1889 he published the axioms for the natural numbers that carry his name, in a Latin pamphlet that became a landmark of mathematical logic. In 1890 he constructed a continuous curve filling a square, a result that had been thought impossible, and in 1886 he proved an existence theorem for first order differential equations. His 1888 Geometrical Calculus gave an early modern definition of a vector space. After 1900 he devoted himself to the Formulario Mathematico, a collection of theorems written in his own logical notation, and to an artificial language, Latino sine flexione.