Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (Great Discoveries) - Softcover

Goldstein, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393327604 ISBN 13: 9780393327601

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006

Synopsis

"A gem...An unforgettable account of one of the great moments in the history of human thought." ―Steven Pinker

Probing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning―and brought him to the edge of madness.

4 illustrations

About this title

Review:

Kurt Gödel is often held up as an intellectual revolutionary whose incompleteness theorem helped tear down the notion that there was anything certain about the universe. Philosophy professor, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Goldstein reinterprets the evidence and restores to Gödel's famous idea the meaning he claimed he intended: that there is a mathematical truth--an objective certainty--underlying everything and existing independently of human thought. Gödel, Goldstein maintains, was an intellectual heir to Plato whose sense of alienation from the positivists and postmodernists of the 1940s was only ameliorated by his friendship with another intellectual giant, Albert Einstein. As Goldstein writes, "That his work, like Einstein's, has been interpreted as not only consistent with the revolt against objectivity but also as among its most compelling driving forces is ... more than a little ironic."

This and other paradoxes of Gödel's life are woven throughout Incompleteness, with biographical details taking something of a back seat to the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of his theories. As an introduction to one of the three most profound scientific insights of the 20th century (the other two being Einstein's relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), Incompleteness is accessible, yet intellectually rigorous. Goldstein succeeds admirably in retiring inaccurate interpretations of Gödel's ideas. --Therese Littleton

About the Author:

Rebecca Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow, a professor of philosophy, and the author of five novels and a collection of short stories. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0393327604
• ISBN 13: 9780393327601
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300