Page "Axiom" Paragraph 22

Early mathematicians regarded axiomatic geometry as a model of physical space, and obviously there could only be one such model.

The idea that alternative mathematical systems might exist was very troubling to mathematicians of the 19th century and the developers of systems such as Boolean algebra made elaborate efforts to derive them from traditional arithmetic.

Galois showed just before his untimely death that these efforts were largely wasted.

Ultimately, the abstract parallels between algebraic systems were seen to be more important than the details and modern algebra was born.

In the modern view axioms may be any set of formulas, as long as they are not known to be inconsistent.