It is said that Cauchy was a pioneer of rigour in calculus and a founder of complex analysis. Yet if baffles me as set theory was an invention of the 1870s, 20 years after the death of Cauchy. Currently the beginning of most concepts in mathematics begins with the concept of set. Furthermore the concept of groups whose foundations were laid by Galois and Abel were done so long before set theory.
I hope there is a genral way to answer these questions
1) We define functions with a domain and range both being sets. But when Cauchy used the symbol 'f(x)', what did it really mean to him? As Cauchy was notorious for his rigorous approach, it is hard to believe that he may have just used the word function ambiguously with intuitive satisfaction.
(If the following question makes the topic too broad I'd be more than happy to list it as a separate question.
2)To a certain extent I can even brush away the idea of functions before sets. But I simply cannot grasp how the concept of group was formulated without a set and I'm puzzled as to how Galois and Abel were independently able to frame methods to prove the unsolvability of the quintic (these days the proof makes generous use of set theory)without sets.
In these days where N, Z, Q and R all sets, how did the early masters do what they did? How on earth was calculus made rigorous without the sets of different numbers?
Best Answer
Some hints...
You can start reading Cauchy's elucidation of function (1823) :
Thus, in a nutshell, the concept of "function" was a primitive one, like today for set. A function is a correspondence (a relation) between two "variable quantities".
It is worth noting that Cauchy's definition of "variable quantity" was already present into de L'Hôpital's textbook : Analyse des infiniment petits pour l'intelligence des lignes courbes (1st ed, 1696), the first calculus' textbook. See :
An early occurrence of "function" is in Leibniz, in De linea ex lineis numero infinitis ordinatim ductis inter se concurrentibus formata, easque omnes tangente, ac de novo in ea re Analysis infinitorum usu (1692), but a "reasonable" definition of function is available only with Johann Bernoulli, Remarques sur ce qu'on a donne jusqu'ici de solutions des problemes sur les isopdrimitres (1718) and Leonhard Euler, Introductio in analysin infinitorum (1748).
Regarding group we may see e.g. Arthur Cayley : he uses the name "set" in his definition of group (1854) :
Set here is not a mathematical object : no specific properties of sets are assumed.