[HN Gopher] Kurt Godel's Brilliant Madness
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Kurt Godel's Brilliant Madness
Author : DevilMadeMeDoIT
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-04-15 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cantorsparadise.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cantorsparadise.com)
| kruxigt wrote:
| Paywall sux.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| As an anxious person with hypochondria and germaphobia I could
| relate to a lot of this (I have in the past also kept journals of
| my temperature taken several times per day)
|
| > "you simply cannot [...] find the concentration necessary for
| research if you read twice a day [about] things [...] which touch
| the basis of the civilization of your country as well as your
| personal existence".
|
| Kind of feels like the recent couple of years in the US. Only we
| don't just get news twice a day, we're constantly inundated with
| it. Interesting that the same advice is given now, only it
| includes not just avoiding the news but also social media - in my
| experience it's pretty essential advice.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Crazy to see that he was perpetually afraid of being poisoned and
| starved himself to death.
| bidirectional wrote:
| I just find it bizarre that one of the greatest minds of the
| 20th century starved to death, weighing 65 lbs, in late 70s
| Princeton. I realise there's no easy way to counteract someone
| determined not to eat, but it just seems like such a slow,
| painful and irrational way to die that it's hard to fathom
| (obviously driven by severe mental illness).
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The thing about mathematics and logic is that logic went from
| being a branch of philosophy to a branch of mathematics and once
| logic was formalized it could then be described in terms of
| mechanical calculation. The proof of the halting problem took
| less than a page in my college text on Language, Automata and
| Machines and some version of the proof of Godel's Incompleteness
| Theorem take little more space. But that's now that the
| properties of computation are well established and can be hand-
| waved away.
|
| So a lot of what Kurt Godel did was follow a fairly inevitable
| progression before anyone else. And it is one of those ironic the
| result, that the-provable and the truth are far apart, did not
| please such a brilliant idealist.
|
| Edit: From wikipedia: "Mathematical logic emerged in the mid-19th
| century as a subfield of mathematics, reflecting the confluence
| of two traditions: formal philosophical logic and mathematics
| (Ferreiros 2001, p. 443). "Mathematical logic, also called
| 'logistic', 'symbolic logic', the 'algebra of logic', and, more
| recently, simply 'formal logic', is the set of logical theories
| elaborated in the course of the last [nineteenth] century with
| the aid of an artificial notation and a rigorously deductive
| method."[3] Before this emergence, logic was studied with
| rhetoric, with calculationes,[4] through the syllogism, and with
| philosophy. "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic#History
| lqet wrote:
| Great read.
|
| > Kurt Godel, only a year beyond his PhD, announced a result
| which would forever change the foundations of mathematics. He
| formalized the liar paradox, "This statement is false" to prove
| roughly that for any effectively axiomatized consistent extension
| T of number theory (Peano arithmetic) there is a sentence s which
| asserts its own unprovability in T. John von Neumann, who was in
| the audience immediately understood the importance of Godel's
| incompleteness theorem. [...]
|
| > In the next few weeks von Neumann realized that by
| arithmetizing the proof of Godel's first theorem, one could prove
| an even better one, that no such formal system T could prove its
| own consistency. A few weeks later he brought his proof to Godel,
| who thanked him and informed him politely that he had already
| submitted the second incompleteness theorem for publication.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Adele Thusnelda Porkert: An absolute hero in the world of math
| and science.
|
| I remember reading some short bios that (with a wink and nod)
| mentioned Godel had a relationship with a cabaret dancer. I
| remember absolutely detesting it.
|
| Making a life with a genius, obsessive compulsive individual
| doesn't seem very easy to say the least.
|
| Nevermind the importance of the individual to society, and the
| implied responsibility that came with it.
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