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www.logicmatters.net
| | billwadge.com

The famous mathematician Kurt Gödel proved two "incompleteness" theorems. This is their story. By the 1930s logicians, especially Tarski, had figured out the semantics of predicate logic. Tarski described what exactly was an 'interpretation' and what it meant for a formula to be true in an interpretation. Briefly, an interpretation is a nonempty set (the...
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| | carcinisation.com

Gödel's theorems say something important about the limits of mathematical proof. Proofs in mathematics are (among other things) arguments. A typical mathematical argument may not be "inside" the universe it's saying something about. The Pythagorean theorem is a statement about the geometry of triangles, but it's hard to make a proof of it using nothing...
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| | neilmadden.blog

I saw another article on Gödel's incompleteness theorems linked from Reddit today. It's a topic I've wanted to write about for some time. Although many articles do a decent job in giving an idea of what the big deal is (and this one is pretty good), they can sometimes give a misleading impression of what...
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| | scottaaronson.blog

In Michael Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having opened the book for over a decade. It goes like this: Let f:{0,1}*?{0,1} be the constant 1 function if God exists, or the constant 0 function...
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