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New Comic Book About Logic, Math, and Madness
areYouAHypnotist writes to tell us the New York Times has the scoop on a new comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. "The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber, and Adolf Hitler."
For those looking for a more fun and lighthearted but still very nerdy comic, Check out the brilliant webcomic "Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" at http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/ One of the my most favorite things I've found on the internets :)
This page (Dutch) has a link to the PDF (bottom of the article) of the Dutch translation of the first chapter. (I would have linked to an English translation, but I am not aware of any preview releases.)
I read the first chapter, and found it pretty cool, but also awkward to read it in Dutch, since the characters (in ch. 1) are all Britons or Americans.
Anyway, if you're interested, have a look at it.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Godel is mentioned on the second page of TFA.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
If a conjecture can neither be proven nor disproved given a set of axioms, then either the conjecture or the axioms were wrongly chosen. If your ultimate goal is to prove or disprove that conjecture, you must pick a set of axioms that allows that goal to be achieved. If your ultimate goal is to prove or disprove every conjecture possible given a specific set of axioms, then you must ignore the conjectures that can neither be proven nor disproved with that set of axioms.
It isn't that math doesn't work. Given a set of axioms, you can find absolute truths. However, not all absolute truths can be discovered with a single set of axioms.
Infinite God by definition is not restricted to a subjective point of observation.
The GP is playing the subjective/objective game.
Hypatia, Ada Lovelace, Mary Cartwright.
[FUCK BETA]
Actually I mean this.
Literally I mean "For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths* and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent."
* he means the peano axioms (to be exact a small subset of them). In general you could say he means any "reasonable" axiom set that contains a sucessor function, as that's the essential part.