"Problem: Name a book that combines mathematical history, philosophy, more than a whiff of theology, personal palaver, and brilliant insights, along with evidence of a Borges-like imagination, eyebrow-raising mathematical constructions, breathtaking excitement, grandiose ruminations, and some bosh. Solution: The book under review. ...Ω leads me to turn 180 degrees away from these classical philosophical questions—discussed ad nauseam and with diminishing profit—of why mathematics is true, whether its objects and constructs have ontological validity, whether it is the only mode of inference, what its limitations are, whether it is the unique language in which theoretical physics must be formulated. If we could focus instead on mathematical pragmatics—why mathematics throughout the millennia has been useful or deleterious to society—then I believe that we might be able to illuminate an aspect of mathematics that is often ignored: mathematics as a enterprise, for that is surely what it is."
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Philosophers from the United StatesComputer scientists from the United StatesMathematicians from the United StatesPeople from ChicagoLogicians from the United States
Original Language: English
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, "Omega: Chaitin’s Demon" SIAM News, Vol. 39, No. 1, (Jan/Feb 2006) A Book Review of Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega by Gregory Chaitin (2005)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gregory_Chaitin
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Gregory Chaitin
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