Meta Math!

The Quest for Omega (Peter N. Nevraumont Books)

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Gregory Chaitin: Meta Math! (2005, Pantheon)

240 pages

English language

Published Oct. 4, 2005 by Pantheon.

ISBN:
978-0-375-42313-0
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In Meta Math!, Gregory Chaitin, one of the world's foremost mathematicians, leads us on a spellbinding journey of scientific discovery and illuminates the process by which he arrived at his groundbreaking theories.All of science is based on mathematics, but mathematicians have become painfully aware that math itself has serious limitations. This notion was first revealed in the work of two giants of twentieth-century mathematics: Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. Now their successor, Gregory Chaitin, digs even deeper into the foundations of mathematics, demonstrating that mathematics is riddled with randomness, enigmas, and paradoxes.Chaitin's revolutionary discovery, the Omega number, is an exquisitely complex representation of unknowability in mathematics. His investigations shed light on what, ultimately, we can know about the universe and the very nature of life. But if unknowability is at the core of Chaitin's theories, the great gift of his book is its completely engaging knowability. In an infectious and …

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