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Absolutely agree. GEB constantly tries to prove the cleverness of the author, complete with winks and nudges. It stacks so many unintuitive analogies on top of
by et1337 8y ago
Absolutely agree. GEB constantly tries to prove the cleverness of the author, complete with winks and nudges. It stacks so many unintuitive analogies on top of each other that I spent most of the time trying to recall which real-world concepts they all mapped to.
Also, the book is about 98% Gödel and 2% Escher and Bach. Any time it steps outside its wheelhouse of math and into the realm of philosophy or art, you get the distinct sense that it has no idea what it's talking about.
Do yourself a favor and just take discrete math 1 and read a few Wikipedia articles instead.
- mhneu 8y agoDo yourself a favor and just take discrete math 1 and read a few Wikipedia articles instead. +100, exactly. I have some familiarity with mathematical logic, and with Bach (though admittedly I'm less familiar with Escher) and I found GEB to be unintuitive at best, and misleading at worst. To be honest, there may not be anything really magic about Goedel's incompleteness theorem once you grasp the core concept, which is: If you encode all proofs into a formal language, you can make a statement that is true but unprovable. (Which is, effectively: "This statement has no proof"). Most of Goedel's work on the incompleteness theorem was on the systematization of proofs, which can be tedious to work through. I found at the time Godel's completeness theorem to be more interesting. Though I never got into model theory or more advanced mathematical logic so, grain of salt.