Kennedy H.C. (ed.) Selected works of Guiseppe Peano

London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973. — 259 p. — ISBN: 0041640020.The influence of Giuseppe Peano on turn-of-the-century mathematics and logic was great. In the decade preceding 1900, for example, Peano and members of his school were leaders in contemporary developments in logic.
If the initiative then passed to Bertrand Russell in England, this was because Peano inspired him when they met at the International Philosophical Congress in Paris in August 1900. Russell has said (in his Autobiography): 'The Congress was a turning point in my intellectual development, because I there met Peano.' Peano's influence on mathematics is only partly illustrated by what is named after him, for example the postulates for the natural numbers and the space-filling curve. His influence was perhaps greatest, as he himself said in 1915, in the development of the calculus. He seemed particularly skilled in the discovery of counterexamples to currently accepted notions and theorems. The space-filling curve was a spectacular example, but there were many others. His call for rigour in the treatment of notions such as surface area was not new, but his contributions played an influential role.