Logical Dilemmas (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: John W. Dawson
- First Published: 1997
- Type of Work: Biography
- Time of Work: 1906-1978
- Setting: Austria and the United States
- Principal Characters: Kurt Gödel, Adele Porkert, Albert Einstein, Oskar Morgenstern, John von Neumann
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Intellectuals, Philosophy or philosophers, Psychology or psychologists, Supernatural, Extrasensory perception or powers, Science or scientists, College life, Truth, Austria or Austrians, Mathematics or mathematicians, Logic
- Locales: United States, Austria
In 1930, shortly after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, logician Kurt Gödel announced to friends the discovery of a formally undecidable proposition. He proved that there is a statement in the language of elementary number theory which is true but which can neither be proved true nor false. Thus, he concluded, any formal mathematical system strong enough to include elementary number theory cannot prove its own consistency.
These unexpected results, known as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, not only ran counter to most scientists’ implicit assumptions about...
[The entire page is 1984 words long]
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