At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical way of thinking into the world of physics. At the time, physicists ...
You will never be able to prove every mathematical truth. For me, this incompleteness theorem, discovered by Kurt Gödel, is one of the most incredible results in mathematics. It may not surprise ...
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter was ...