毁掉数学的人

The man who ruined mathematics The incompleteness theorem is accepted as part of the mathematical canon today, but it was a bombshell when Kurt Gödel first introduced it, says Jacob Aron. KURT GÖDEL was born in 1906, smack-bang in the middle of the greatest crisis maths has ever known. A few decades later, his incompleteness theorem would help resolve this turmoil, but doom mathematicians to a smaller world than the one that came before. The story begins at a Paris conference in 1900, where mathematician David Hilbert presented a list of 23 unsolved problems. The task that would come to occupy Gödel was Hilbert’s second problem. …