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Russell's Paradox & the Foundations Crisis

Bertrand Russell · 1901

"Russell showed that naive set theory lets you define 'the set of all sets that don't contain themselves,' which both contains and doesn't contain itself — forcing mathematics to rebuild its foundations with stricter rules."

The idea

Gottlob Frege thought he had finished the foundations of mathematics. Russell found the counterexample in 1901 and mailed it to him in June 1902, as Frege's second volume was going to press: 'the set of all sets that do not contain themselves' — and Frege's system collapsed.

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