Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems

Bol

For good reasons, however, hardly any work deals with Gödel's article in its original form: His complex lines of thought described with meticulous precision, the many definitions and theorems, and the now largely outdated notation turn Gödel's historical masterpiece into a difficult read. This book explores Gödel's original proof in detail. In 1931, the mysterious-sounding article "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I" shook the mathematical world. In this article, Kurt Gödel proved two incompleteness theorems that have fundamentally changed our view of mathematics. Gödel's theorems manifest that the concept of truth and the concept of provability cannot coincide. Since their discovery, the incompleteness theorems have attracted much attention, and a flood of articles and books have been devoted to their striking consequences. For good reasons, however, hardly any work deals with Gödel's article in its original form: His complex lines of thought described with meticulous precision, the many definitions and theorems, and the now largely outdated notation turn Gödel's historical masterpiece into a difficult read. This book explores Gödel's original proof in detail. All individual steps are carefully explained and illustrated with numerous examples. However, this book is more than just an annotated version of the historical article, as the proper understanding of Gödel's work requires a solid grasp of history. Thus, numerous excursions take the reader back to the beginning of the twentieth century. It was the time when mathematics experienced one of its greatest crises, when type theory and axiomatic set theory were taking shape, and Hilbert's formalistic logic and Brouwer's intuitionistic mathematics were openly confronting each other. This book is the revised translation of the second edition of the author's German language book "Die Gödel'schen Unvollständigkeitssätze". The author Dirk W. Hoffmann is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Business Information Systems at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany.

Bol Partner

An introduction to the work of the mathematical logician Kurt Godel, which guides the reader through his Theorem of Undecidability and his theories on the completeness of logic, the incompleteness of numbers and the consistency of the axiom of choice. Kurt Godel, the greatest logician of our time, startled the world of mathematics in 1931 with his Theorem of Undecidability, which showed that some statements in mathematics are inherently "undecidable". His work on the completeness of logic, the incompleteness of number theory, and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum theory brought him further worldwide fame. In this introductory volume, Raymond Smullyan, himself a well-known logician, guides the reader through the fascinating world of Godel's incompleteness theorems. The level of presentation is suitable for anyone with a basic acquaintance with mathematical logic. As a clear, concise introduction to a difficult but essential subject, the book will appeal to mathematicians, philosophers, and computer scientists.