Axiomatic method in the context of "History of geometry"

Mathematical practice comprises the working practices of professional mathematicians: selecting theorems to prove, using informal notations to persuade themselves and others that various steps in the final proof are convincing, and seeking peer review and publication, as opposed to the end result of proven and published theorems.

Philip Kitcher has proposed a more formal definition of a mathematical practice, as a quintuple. His intention was primarily to document mathematical practice through its historical changes.

Pure mathematics is the study of mathematical concepts independently of any application outside mathematics. These concepts may originate in real-world concerns, and the results obtained may later turn out to be useful for practical applications, but pure mathematicians are not primarily motivated by such applications. Instead, the appeal is attributed to the intellectual challenge and aesthetic beauty of working out the mathematical consequences of basic principles.

While pure mathematics has existed as an activity since at least ancient Greece, the concept was elaborated upon around the year 1900, after the introduction of theories with counter-intuitive properties (such as non-Euclidean geometries and Cantor's theory of infinite sets), and the discovery of apparent paradoxes (such as continuous functions that are nowhere differentiable, and Russell's paradox). This introduced the need to renew the concept of mathematical rigor and rewrite all mathematics accordingly, with a systematic use of axiomatic methods. This led many mathematicians to focus on mathematics for its own sake, that is, pure mathematics.

Synthetic geometry (sometimes referred to as axiomatic geometry or even pure geometry) is geometry without the use of coordinates. It relies on the axiomatic method for proving all results from a few basic properties, initially called postulates and at present called axioms.

After the 17th-century introduction by René Descartes of the coordinate method, which was called analytic geometry, the term "synthetic geometry" was coined to refer to the older methods that were, before Descartes, the only known ones.