Complete Disorder is Impossible: The Mathematical Work of Walter Deuber

In 1928 the young British mathematician Frank Plumpton Ramsey had written a paper ‘On a problem in formal logic’, which was published in 1930 in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. It is the paper for which he became eponymous for the field of Discrete Mathematics nowadays known as Ramsey Theory . The objective was to give a decision procedure for the sentences of propositional logic. The need for such procedures – in present day terminology we would call them algorithms – arose with the crisis of the foundations of mathematics around 1900. It is somewhat ironic that a purely mathematical result (which is now called Ramsey’s theorem) from Ramsey’s paper has proved to be of greater consequence than the metamathematical investigations for which it was made a tool.