History
The concept burst upon the scene of 20th-century philosophy as a result of the work of the German mathematician David Hilbert, who in 1905 published a proposal for proof of the consistency of mathematics, creating the field of metamathematics. His hopes for the success of this proof were dashed by the work of Kurt Gödel who in 1931 proved this to be unattainable by his incompleteness theorems. Nevertheless, his program of unsolved mathematical problems, out of which grew this metamathematical proposal, continued to influence the direction of mathematics for the rest of the 20th century.
The study of metatheory became widespread during the rest of that century by its application in other fields, notably scientific linguistics and its concept of metalanguage.
Read more about this topic: Metatheory
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