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I'd rephrase it as It's a harmless human illogicality at the heart of math. True math is often very beautiful. Being unable to prove something one way or ano
by VLM 11y ago
I'd rephrase it as
It's a harmless human illogicality at the heart of math.
True math is often very beautiful. Being unable to prove something one way or another is seen as very ugly. Unfortunately it might very well be unprovable and thus a permanent pimple on the face of mathematics. So mathematicians are going to get all worked up about it for eternity even if it is unsolvable because it is ugly not to be solved on way or another. Of course unsolvable problems have a strange way of getting solved in weird ways after a zillion combined human lifetimes of effort.
It doesn't seem unrealistic that a math problem can be defined that cannot be proven. Someone named Godel had a lot to say on the topic. Turing too. Mostly they get misquoted, I see no reason to add to the existing corpus of misquoting.
I could add a "funny" analogy to some theoretical physics topics here too. Physics is weaker in that the physical world is simpler than the imaginative world so its more likely physics will eventually stop, and stops are invariably at a rather ugly point. Some might say it has already stopped. But at some point it will stop, probably before math hits its stopping point.