3 ms·
I rather enjoyed the book, but it is largely because I knew what I was getting into. It's a pop science book, written by a person with a philosophical backgroun
by antiform 18y ago
I rather enjoyed the book, but it is largely because I knew what I was getting into. It's a pop science book, written by a person with a philosophical background, and embellished in the Hollywood-esque fashion, pitting the good guy--Goedel, the misunderstood genius--against the bad guy--Wittgenstein and the logical positivists--in a no-holds-barred showdown of ideas that lie at the heart of all truth and mathematics!
Obviously, it's a stretch at times, and there a good deal of rigor lost, but it's a pretty juicy story. If I wanted a biography, I would read one specifically about Goedel, and not one about Incompleteness. If I wanted to learn about the theorems themselves, I would pick up a copy of his paper or one of the many readable expositions of his work. But I wanted a fun read that explained why so many philosophers and nonmathematicians were interested in this rather esoteric bit of mathematics, and I certainly got that from the book.
Nonetheless, if you want a better book by the author, I recommend The Mind-Body Problem over this one.