CH 20: The Man who was Sure About Uncertainty
Kurt Gödel was a very influential logician, mathematician and philosopher in the twentieth century. During Gödel’s lifetime, there was a major attempt by the scientific community to completely determine all the laws that govern mathematics. This was a half-century of concerted efforts to figure out all the potential rules; in math we call them axioms, which form the foundations of mathematics.
His genius and breakthrough was in realizing that the system of mathematics, while consistent, cannot ever be made complete. Furthermore, consistencies in the theory cannot be proven within the theory itself. This was called the Incompleteness Theorem and had profound implications for the philosophy of mathematics. From a philosophical, although not a mathematical standpoint, it may mean that we can never know for sure if anything is truly correct or not in math. This also might portend that a Theory of Everything is seemingly elusive.
Probably a picture of Kurt Gödel