Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932) was Professor of
Mathematics at the University of Turin. In 1889 Peano published his
famous axioms, called the Peano Postulates, which defined the
natural numbers,
. These were
published in a pamphlet written in Latin, Arithmetices principia,
nova methodo exposita . Below is a modern version (more
or less in English). Basically the same axioms were propounded a decade
earlier, in 1879, by Richard Dedekind (1831-1916) in his Über
die Theorie der ganzen algebraischen Zahlen, although somehow
Peano's name is the one usually associated with them.
NOTE HOMEWORK SUGGESTED JUST ABOVE