The Cosmic Language: A History of Hans Freudenthal's Lincos

Abstract

This thesis looks at Hans Freudenthal's book Lincos (1960) from a historical perspective. In order to place Lincos in its full historic context this thesis will analyze Lincos from three different perspectives. These perspectives roughly correspond to Lincos’ three possible target audiences. Namely Lincos for extraterrestrial recipients, Lincos for scientists and Lincos for the public. I approach each perspective in its own chapter. The first chapter, focusing on how Lincos teaches its language to its intended recipients will focus on Freudenthal’s interest in mathematics education as well as his role in the New Math movement and how this all relates to Lincos. The second chapter will look at the philosophical debates that Freudenthal engages in, primarily in the introduction of Lincos. These debates are all within the philosophy of language and formal linguistics. It also considers the relation between works like Project OZMA and Lincos and the interest in the extraterrestrial life debate of Freudenthal’s peers. The third chapter looks at the prevalence of extraterrestrials in Dutch newspapers in the 1950s in order to explain the reception to Lincos by the public. The reason for this approach is that Lincos is a work in which multiple different fields come together (mathematics education, formal linguistics and the extraterrestrial life debate). The goal will be to understand Lincos in its full historical context, to understand why Freudenthal wrote such a work in such a way. The main argument will be that Lincos cannot be seen as a work in solely either mathematics education, formal linguistics or communication with extraterrestrial life. Instead it is a work with which Freudenthal had more than one goal all of which could be conveniently achieved with a single work because of how he saw the nature of the task to create a cosmic language.