

Did Poincaré anticipate Gödel? - sajid
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath650/kmath650.htm

======
Udik
In my (vane) attempt at reading Melville's Moby Dick I was struck at some
point (Chapter 32: Cetology) by the following sentence, floating in a stormy
and rather muddy sea of ramblings and jokes:

"Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive
classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be
filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man
advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors.
_I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete,
must for that very reason infallibly be faulty_."

~~~
falsedan
you mean, vain[1] attempt.

[1]
[http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/vain.html](http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/vain.html)

~~~
Udik
Oops. Embarassing, especially since I boasted a few days ago of never
misspelling an English word :) Thanks!

~~~
Udik
And, I did it again :)

------
hurin
I don't know specifically why the article focuses on Poincare and anticipating
Godel (it seems like a bit of a stretch).

But Poincare's writings on the philosophy of mathematics and science are
really excellent.

link:
[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37157/37157-pdf.pdf](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37157/37157-pdf.pdf)

~~~
YAYERKA
English translations of _Science and Hypothesis_ as well as _The Measure of
Time_ can be read here;

`[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Science_and_Hypothesis'](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Science_and_Hypothesis'),

`[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_Time'](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_Time').

In French, most of Poincare's original works can be read here;

`[http://henripoincarepapers.univ-
lorraine.fr/bibliohp/index.p...](http://henripoincarepapers.univ-
lorraine.fr/bibliohp/index.php?a=on&jo=Revue+de+m%C3%A9taphysique+et+de+morale&action=Chercher').

~~~
YAYERKA
[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Science_and_Hypothesis](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Science_and_Hypothesis)

[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_Time](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_Time)

------
faragon
Such a marvelous mind. From works quoted in the article, I read Poincaré's
"Science et méthode" (in its Spanish translation "Ciencia y método") many
years ago, being student. Got shocked, in similar way to when I found Bertrand
Russell's works. Brilliant, sharp, elegant, kind, insightful, beautiful, and
I'm still short in adjectives. I recommend it to everyone.

------
CurtMonash
It was said that Poincare' was the last person who ever knew all of
mathematics.

------
danbmil99
I don't know, but they both anticipated unicode.

~~~
jerf
I remember browsing this site before Unicode was even a vague plan. The march
of charsets has not been kind to the site. But if you use that as an excuse to
sneer and pass over it, you will be missing out on a true unsung gem. At
least, if you like math. This is the sort of site that the web was created for
in the first place.

I recommend "Reflections on Relativity" if you need a concrete starting place.
Here on HN over the years I have wished it would be published at various
times, but I am now happy to say I have a physical copy, despite having read
it online at least three times before. It was worth it just to see it typeset
properly.

~~~
peterfirefly
UTF-8 is from 1992 (published in January 1993). ISO 8859-1 is from 1985.

~~~
jerf
Then perhaps rather I should say before anybody knew about it. Fair enough.
The world was not running on Unicode until well after this site was
established.

~~~
peterfirefly
Windows NT's first release was 3.1 from 1993. Windows 2000 (which was really
NT 5.0) was released in 2000.

I was fully able to write both Gödel and Poincaré with both 8859-1 and HTML
entities and in both WordPerfect and Word back in the 90's (the current
version of the page is generated by Microsoft Word 10).

The problem is not unicode but the fact that it was written by an
American/someone who is rather sloppy with names. For example, he writes "Paul
Von Hindenberg" when he means "Paul von Hindenburg". Things like that are
trivial to get right unless one actually doesn't care.

------
alricb
If you're going to put the umlaut on the ö, you might as well put the acute
accent on the é: Poincaré. Otherwise the e would be silent.

~~~
mh-cx
... or if you can't type ö on your keyboard, at least write “oe“ as in Goedel.
Just a little hint from a German native here. (Same goes for ae and ue instead
of ä and ü).

~~~
_delirium
Interestingly that's getting less common in Scandinavia. It's the "proper"
transliteration, but many people with names like Søren prefer to anglicize
them as Soren rather than Soeren, if anglicization is needed. Not universally,
but it's my impression of the trend.

