Book Announcement
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg8050] Book Announcement
- From: "Gregory J. Chaitin" <chaitin at watson.ibm.com>
- Date: Mon, 4 Aug 1997 01:47:34 -0400
- Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
THE LIMITS OF MATHEMATICS--- A course on information theory & the limits of formal reasoning G. J. Chaitin (IBM Research) To be published by Springer-Verlag Singapore. Currently at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/lm.html together with information on how to order it from Springer-Verlag. This book presents the final version of Chaitin's course on the limits of mathematical reasoning. This course uses algorithmic information theory to show that mathematics has serious limitations, and features a new more didactic approach to algorithmic information theory using lisp and Mathematica software. The thesis of the book is that the incompleteness phenomenon discovered by Goedel is much more widespread and serious than hitherto suspected. Also Goedel and Einstein's views on the foundations of mathematics are discussed, and it is suggested that mathematics is quasi-empirical and that experimental mathematics should be used more freely. The software for this book can be downloaded from MathSource at Wolfram Research at http://www.wolfram.com by querying for "0208-820".