Named in memory of the famous British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), initiator of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason in England and France. Although he worked extensively on political ideas, his main concern was with epistemology, noting that human knowledge rests on experience of the external world and on reflection. Mathematical reasoning is deductive and is to be understood in terms of an intellectual intuition of relations between ideas. In his famous
Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), he set down the foundations of an epistemology of modern science. Citation prepared by S. Elst at the request of the discoverer.