

Book review: The Limits of Mathematics by Gregory Chaitin - p4bl0
http://shebang.ws/the-limits-of-mathematics.html

======
jacobolus
Chaitin’s website about the book, which seems to include the full contents (in
HMTL format): <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/lm.html>

A PDF draft from 1994 at Arxiv: <http://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9407009>

Some other links about the book (putting these here to save people scrolling
through many pages of search results & running into journal paywalls):

The only review at Amazon (2 stars):
<http://www.amazon.com/review/R1ZJVJX57T6YVA/>

[http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/reviews/reviews...](http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/reviews/reviews_16_4_vallee.pdf)

<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/siam.html>

A couple reviews whose "official" URLs are journal-paywalled:
<http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/bookrev/30-1.pdf>
<http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~svozil/publ/greg.htm>

Math Trek: <http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_03_06_06.html>

* * *

Everything2 page about Chaitin: <http://everything2.com/title/Gregory+Chaitin>

Several interesting looking papers in this book:
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/20445762/Randomness-and-
Complexity...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/20445762/Randomness-and-Complexity-
From-Leibniz-to-Chaitin)

Slashdot review/discussion of another Chaitin book, _Metamath! The Quest for
Omega_ : <http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/10/1947247>

The page about that book (full text also available, apparently):
<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/omega.html> and Arxiv:
<http://arxiv.org/abs/math.HO/0404335>

[http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/two-
philosoph...](http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/two-philosophies-
of-mathematical-weirdness)

~~~
davidmathers
The Limits of Mathematics---Tutorial Version

<http://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9509010v1>

 _Previously in this LISP code only one-character identifiers were allowed,
and arithmetic had to be programmed out. Now identifiers can be many
characters long, and arithmetic with arbitrarily large unsigned decimal
integers is built in. This and many other changes in the software have made
this material much easier to understand and to use._

------
VladRussian
When i hear something along the lines of "limits of mathematics", a picture of
Leibnitz tiresomely counting tortoise and Achilles steps comes to mind.
Fortunately, instead of dwelling on, Leibnitz and the other bright minds were
able to transcend the limits of the mathematics of the time.

Chaitin is a great mathematician, and there is no doubts about the limits he
and others great ones have unquestionably proved. These works are great
masterpieces. What looks strange is that it seems that modern human
civilization has passively accepted the limits as the ultimate truth instead
of trying to transcend them.

------
fogus
I wrote a review of Chaitin's _Algorithmic Information Theory_ a couple of
years ago. I talk briefly about his approach in using Lisp.
[http://blog.fogus.me/2008/12/19/bookpr0n-0-gregory-
chaitins-...](http://blog.fogus.me/2008/12/19/bookpr0n-0-gregory-chaitins-
algorithmic-information-theory/)

------
sbt
I always found Chaitin's books very enjoyable. The guy does not exactly curb
his enthusiasm for algorithmic information theory, often with erotic allusions
- it's porn for discrete mathematicians :)

