Re:Does Gödel Matter?
by ionfish on Monday December 22, 2008 @09:08AM
(#406363)
I've read the book the article ostensibly reviews, and to be honest it's not much cop. It's full of, frankly, a load of rubbish about post-modern thought and the extent to which Gödel's work might vindicate it. There are certainly interesting aspects to it, but it's neither a good biography nor a particularly good introduction to incompleteness, and is liable to merely frustrate anyone possessed of a passing acquaintance with either subject.
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I rather enjoyed the book, but it is largely because I knew what I was getting into. It's a pop science book, written by a person with a philosophical background, and embellished in the Hollywood-esque fashion, pitting the good guy--Goedel, the misunderstood genius--against the bad guy--Wittgenstein and the logical positivists--in a no-holds-barred showdown of ideas that lie at the heart of all truth and mathematics!
Obviously, it's a stretch at times, and there a good deal of rigor lost, but it's a pretty juicy story. If I wanted a biography, I would read one specifically about Goedel, and not one about Incompleteness. If I wanted to learn about the theorems themselves, I would pick up a copy of his paper or one of the many readable expositions of his work. But I wanted a fun read that explained why so many philosophers and nonmathematicians were interested in this rather esoteric bit of mathematics, and I certainly got that from the book.
Nonetheless, if you want a better book by the author, I recommend The Mind-Body Problem over this one.
I read the book, and it was sometimes boring, still there's a lot of positive things makes you continue with the book. I got to learn about the works of Godel, Escher and Bach. And then about the patterns which exist in nature, or any work, where we never thought it could be a pattern.
Anyways, I'm not a mathematician or a physicist to comment on Godel's work. I think the book is worth reading, whether it contributed to computer science or not, i do not know.
I got to learn about the works of Godel, Escher and Bach...
You're thinking of the wrong book...