No label defined (Q4518170)

The origins of this book can be traced back to 1986 when the second author (together with \textit{Peter Weibel}) produced a television special on \textit{Kurt Gödel} for the Austrian national television network. 11 years later they published a book in German based on the script of this television feature [\textit{W. DePauli-Schimanovich} and \textit{P. Weibel}, Kurt Gödel: ein mathematischer Mythos. Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. (1997; Zbl 0872.01030)]. The book under review was originally thought to be a new version of the former for the English speaking market, but it grew into an independent project, offering ``a rather leisurely, informal overview of Gödel's magnificent accomplishment and how he did it'' (p. 5). The presentation is non-technical using illustrative analogies like a Chocolate Cake Machine (CCM) asking the ``big question'' whether there is one recipe for every conceivable chocolate cake (cf.\ pp.\ 15-28). A considerable portion of the book is devoted to the impact and to applications of Gödel's theorems on domains like Turing computability, artificial intelligence, complexity, randomness, non-computable numbers, and Hilbert's tenth problem. One chapter deals with Gödel's cosmology, the final chapter with his Platonism.