Monday, September 28, 2009

Key Thinkers Lecture: Mark Colyvan on Gödel

The Director of the SCFS, Professor Mark Colyvan, will be delivering a lecture on "Kurt Gödel and the Limits of Mathematics" for the Key Thinkers Lecture series hosted by Sydney Ideas. The lecture will be given at the New Sydney Law School Building on Wednesday, September 30, 6:30 - 8:00 pm.

View an interview of Mark talking about Gödel.

"Kurt Gödel was one of the foremost mathematicians and logicians of the 20th century. He proved a number of extremely surprising results about the limitations of mathematics. Perhaps the most significant of these is his celebrated incompleteness theorem, which tells us that there are mathematical "blind spots": parts of mathematics that traditional methods of proof cannot access. These results are thought by many to have far-reaching consequences for computing and for our understanding of the nature of the human mind. Gödel's results have thus been the subject of a great deal of popular attention. Indeed, few other results in the history of mathematics have had such an impact outside of mathematics. For those of us who have never heard of Gödel, this lecture will give an accessible outline of his work and achievements."

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