The fabulous destiny of Richard Dedekind

Abstract

By using the preliminary results given in a previous divulgative note, we present here a concise and self–contained introduction to the construction of the real field as the unique, up to increasing isomorphism, Dedekind complete totally ordered field. Moreover, we also show the equivalence between the Dedekind completeness property on totally ordered fields and some meaningful well–known notions present in the literature, such as the Cauchy completeness on totally ordered Archimedean fields. This characterization result allows us to correctly encode the Dedekind completeness for totally ordered fields in the general abstract setting of metric spaces. We believe that the essential parts of the paper can be easily accessed by anyone with some experience in abstract mathematical thinking. The paper completes the lecture given by the second author during the International Workshop on New Horizons in Teaching Science in Messina on June 2018.