Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Scorpio's Logic

The job market for theorists is rough, and for logicians even rougher. Hence some seek employment outside of academia, outside of research labs, outside of mathematics! This may explain the following which appeared in the onion astrology column under Scorpio. We quote it here:
Scorpio Love means different things to different people, but you're the only one for whom it means that to every w-consistent class K of formulas there corresponds recursive class-sign r (on free var. v), such that neither (v Gen r) nor ~(v Gen r) belong to Fig(K).
I leave it to my commenters to identify what this means. However, it does require someone who knows some logic to come up with it. I would like to think that some recent PhD's in logic got a job at the onion and is happy there.

6 comments:

  1. Or perhaps some major of literature who was taught that "this theorem demonstrates that there is no objective truth"?

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  2. Syntactically, it says to me:

    "Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em."

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  3. If you assume two typos (Flg instead of Fig; lower-case omega instead of w) then it is a quote from Godel's paper on the Incompleteness Theorem. It means there's a statement for which no proof from the axioms exists.

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  4. ... I mean, no proof of it or its negation.

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  5. Cool! She's gonna ask me out (I'm a cancer).

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  6. the wikipedia article has this

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorem

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