Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (Great Discoveries)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.38 (559 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393327604 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-11-27 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
4 illustrations. "A gem. An unforgettable account of one of the great moments in the history of human thought." Steven Pinker Probing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning and brought him to the edge of madness
Gödel, Goldstein maintains, was an intellectual heir to Plato whose sense of alienation from the positivists and postmodernists of the 1940s was only ameliorated by his friendship with another intellectual giant, Albert Einstein. Kurt Gödel is often held up as an intellectual revolutionary whose incompleteness theorem helped tear down the notion that there was anything certain about the universe. Goldstein succeeds admirably in retiring inaccurate interpretations of Gödel's ideas. Philosophy professor, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Goldstein reinterprets the evidence and restores to Gödel's famous idea the meaning he claimed he intended: that there is a mathematical truth--an objective certainty--underlying everything and existing indep
Nice biography and history of the subject, weak on philisophical implications nick I enjoyed it very much as a biography and as background material for understanding the history of the idea. Supplemental material was needed to understand the proof. Goldstein is admirable for trying to simplify the proof while sticking to Gödel's way of proving the incompleteness theorem, but there are simpler more modern proofs available (using t. watzizname said Not What I Expected, But .. Probably a better choice for most of us (including me) to read first, which I am glad I did. I was expecting a mathematical book about Goedel's incompleteness theorem, but this is really a biography of Kurt Goedel [Note: 'oe' is the standard substitute for an umlauted 'o' when one doesn't have the option of using the latter, which this text box doesn't . Godel: The Man And The Proof Mead C. Whorton Jr. Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel is truly a marvelous work. After providing the reader with a wonderful overview of Godel's platonistic philosophy, she paints a vivid picture of David Hilbert's attempt to formalize all of mathematics with special emphasis given to Cantor's continuum hypothesis and proving the consi