B. Formalism
In popular terms, formalism is the view that mathematics is a meaningless formal game played with marks on paper, following rules. Traces of a formalist philosophy of mathematics can be found in the writings of Bishop Berkeley, but the major proponents of formalism are David Hilbert (1925), early J. von Neumann (1931) and H. Curry (1951). Hilbert’s formalist programme aimed to translate mathematicas into uninterpreted formal systems. By means of a restricted but meaningful meta-mathematics the formal systems were to be shown to be adequate for mathematics, by deriving formal counterparts of all mathematical truths, and to be safe for mathematics, through consistency proofs.