When I read the title:
"1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI"
my head automatically completed it with
"John von Neumann approves."
I always found it fascinating and a sign of von Neumann's greatness how quickly he not only understood the consequences of Gödel's discovery but also that he immediately and publicly accepted them.
about having already developed an important proof for [Gödel 1931].
The deception was discovered years after both had died.
See [von Plato 2018]
> A shadow is cast on Gödel’s great achievement; there is no way of undoing the fact that Gödel played a well-planned trick to persuade von Neumann not to publish.
To me, it seems like a healthy coping mechanism.
What exactly did Post[POS] and Turing[TUR] do in 1936 that hadn't been done earlier by Gödel[GOD][GOD34] (1931-34) and Church[CHU] (1935)? There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance emerged only later. Many of Gödel's instruction sequences were series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by integers. Gödel did not care that the computational complexity of such multiplications tends to increase with storage size. Similarly, Church also ignored the spatio-temporal complexity of the basic instructions in his algorithms. Turing and Post, however, adopted a traditional, reductionist, minimalist, binary view of computing—just like Konrad Zuse (1936).[ZU36] Their machine models permitted only very simple elementary instructions with constant complexity, like the early binary machine model of Leibniz (1679).[L79][LA14][HO66] Emil Post They did not exploit this back then—for example, in 1936, Turing used his (quite inefficient) model only to rephrase the results of Gödel and Church on the limits of computability. Later, however, the simplicity of these machines made them a convenient tool for theoretical studies of complexity.
More to the point, he has (easy) access to original work because it's written in German.
When I started my PhD I was greeted with an email with the names of all other PhDs starting at the same year, cc'd. So I saw everyone's names (in Office 360- you can see the names attached to the email addresses) and I think there were two or three recognisably Anglosaxon names in about 80 names.
So I suspect it's more that English is used as a lingua franca for students and researchers from all over the world, than that students and researchers are predominantly native English speakers.
Myself, for example, am not a native English speaker :)
Also, I feel like Schmidhuber tends to be German-speaking-centric.
And overall, acknowledging that this is his signature shtick and it's good to have a voice like this too, he does a lot of anachronistic reinterpretations of early discoveries in light of later results. It streamlines the story as if it was always headed towards the today, culling aspects that didn't pan out or magnifying aspects that were at the time more minor and not considered the central issue or angle.