According to a posting he made to sci.crypt, mathematician
Greg Chaitin has published his new book, "The Unknowable", on
the web, at: http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/unknowable and
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/unknowable.
The book presents Chaitin's ideas on algorithmic complexity and the
implications for the foundations of mathematics. Chaitin takes ideas from
Godel's incompleteness theorem and makes them quantitative. Not only
do we know that consistent axioms are incomplete, we can quantify how
much truth they can reveal.
I haven't read the book yet, just some of Chaitin's earlier material,
and I can't claim to understand it too well. The new book is intended
to be a more accessible presentation of his ideas, which further deepens
the threads between his work and that of Godel and Turing.
It's very generous of him to put it out on the web like this! I'm looking
forward to reading it.
Hal
Received on Wed Dec 30 16:15:19 1998
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