scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1532738

Publication date 20 November 2000

artificial intelligence complexity computability cosmology diophantine equations incompleteness platonism time travels undecidability

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Philosophy of mathematics (00A30) Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to history and biography (01-02) History of mathematics in the 20th century (01A60) Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies (01A70) History of mathematical logic and foundations (03-03) Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations (03A05)

Review text

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.

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