Current bedtime reading: Rebecca Goldstein’s book on Gödel and Incompleteness.
It’s been interesting so far, although there are some annoying mistakes. First of all, much of the gimmicky quoting of German is marred by silly mistakes like the repeated reference to “Reine Vernünft” (with the gratuitous and incorrect umlaut in a German logic groupie version of the Heavy Metal Umlaut). Also, some of the facts have not been checked. Goldstein cites Hintikka on the occasion of Gödël’s first public unveiling of his incompleteness result at the second conference on Epistemology of the Exact Sciences held in Königsberg. In the quote from Hintikka, the date is incorrectly given as October 7, 1930. The workshop actually took place September 5-7, 1930.
In any case, I am enjoying the book in spite of these flaws. I certainly shared some of the apparent misconceptions of what the incompleteness results mean, in particular I am learning that Gödel himself did not see their significance in the same way that popular culture seems to have interpreted them.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005, at 9:30 am.
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