- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Perseus Books (16 Aug 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0738205184
- ISBN-13: 978-0738205182
- Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 14.1 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,145,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Godel: A Life Of Logic, The Mind, And Mathematics
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Product Description
Product Description
Kurt Gdel was an intellectual giant. His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Shattering hopes that logic would, in the end, allow us a complete understanding of the universe, Gdel's theorem also raised many provocative questions: What are the limits of rational thought? Can we ever fully understand the machines we build? Or the inner workings of our own minds? How should mathematicians proceed in the absence of complete certainty about their results? Equally legendary were Gdel's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first book for a general audience on this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life.
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First Sentence
There is absolutely no doubt that Godel is the world's greatest living logician; indeed, eminent thinkers such as Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann have declared that he is definitely the greatest logician since Leibniz, or even since Aristotle. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
There is absolutely no doubt that Godel is the world's greatest living logician; indeed, eminent thinkers such as Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann have declared that he is definitely the greatest logician since Leibniz, or even since Aristotle. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Casti, a well known science popularizer, gives in this book an excellent account of the life and work of Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel.
Gödel's Theorem had a profound impact in the 1930's and has been recently used to argue that artificial intelligence is out of reach for computers (see Penrose's "The shadows of the mind").
You might also enjoy reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach..." (the best-selling book from D.R. Hofstadter) for a readable introduction to formal systems and the incompleteness problem.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
There is a full-length biography of Kurt Godel by John Dawson, one of Godel's literary executors and a co-editor of his collected works. In the meantime, this short book tries to give the non-mathenmatician a basic grounding in the facts of his life, the nature of his achievement and the measure of his continuing influence. It's true that the non-technical explanations of Godel's work are remarkably ingenious and vivid, but in most cases they weren't necessarily invented by the book's authors. The style is often awkward, reading as though it was translated from the German by somebody for whom English isn't a first language, and there are a number of basic factual errors - for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein never wrote a book called "Logical Investigations". Being the biography fiend that I am, I could have done with a lot more about Godel's bizarre life and eccentric personality, but maybe it's best to appreciate the man's work before we start being curious about, for example, why he thought he was being poisoned.
To conclude: approach this little sucker with caution. It seems overpriced to me, and the mistakes I've noticed only make me worry about the ones that I haven't.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I don't know how this compares with other books about Godel's life and work, but I've found this an enjoyable read. The main ideas are explained very clearly. The impact of Godel's work on the fields of computer science, cognitive science... is very interesting.
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