michael perelman wrote:
> Mirowski says that Godel's proof rattled both Turing & Van Neuman,
> making them turn from formalizing to matters such as game theory &
> computers.
>
probably true, but IIRC turing published his halting problem result
after 'undecidability propositions of principia mathematica ...'... i'll
have to look it up. one could say thats computational theory, but since
turing's model of computation turns out to be the best available (turing
himself, IIRC having shown the equivalence of the lambda calculus, etc),
and some clear notion of computation being of use in demonstrating
decidability ... blah, blah ... in fact, in computer science curriculum
godel's theorem is often introduced by way of turing machines.
as an interesting side-note: a series of further interesting results
were established post godel. i point you, for fun, to paul cohen's
undecidability proof of the continuum hypothesis in ZFC, and some of his
other results in the space.
--ravi
