Tuesday, January 03, 2006

A Year of Incompleteness

Edited from an email by Jan van Leeuwen and Jiri Wiedermann

The year 2006 will be a special year for the foundations of logic and theoretical computer science because on April 28, 2006 it will be 100 years ago that Kurt Gödel was born.

In 2006 it will also be exactly 75 years ago that Gödel's incompleteness theorem was published and 50 years ago that he wrote his famous letter to von Neumann which is now recognized as one of earliest recognitions of what we now know as the P-versus-NP problem.

Gödel's 100th birthday is beginning to receive some attention among logicians. There will be an International Symposium commemorating "the 100th jubilee of the birth of Kurt Gödel" in Brno (Czech Republic), the city where he was born, a Gödel Centenary 2006 Symposium in Vienna with a special lecture by Roger Penrose, and also at CiE 2006 there will be special attention for Gödel's "legacy for computability".

We note that 2006 also marks the 100th birthday of Richard Rado (well known as a great combinatorial mathematician and born on the same day as Gödel) and also of the well-known statistician William Feller.

3 comments:

  1. A good informative post.

    BTW: "foundation of logic" should either be just "logic" or "foundation of mathematics".

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  2. Happy new year, Lance.

    Speaking of things Godelian, does anyone know the current status of the work by Tatsuaki Okamoto and Ryo Kashima ("Resource Bounded Unprovability of Computational Lower Bounds")? Was this paper salvaged from its alleged flaws?

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  3. The 2006 FLoC (Federated Logic Conference), in Seattle, August 10-22, will have a special session dedicated to Goedel.

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