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Greatest Ideas in History

19 points by denzil_correa 14y ago

oofabz 14y ago
We had some really good ideas before history too, like trade, agriculture, sailing, and animal domestication.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
> Not since Aristotle has such an important theory sprung forth from one man, seemingly out of thin air I'm skeptical. Not to make light of the formalization of information theory, but it seems he was generalizing the idea that you can communicate arbitrary information using code. As inspirations for this generalization, he was able to draw upon several existing examples of such systems, including Hollerith's punch card system that had been around for half a century by that point.
lispm 14y ago
> every logical system will fail and every computer program will crash that's bullshit.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - lispm 14y ago
    in Computer Science and probably Philosophy Kurt Gödel is well known. But outside of that I guess that most people never heard of him. Einstein OTOH is the prototype of the genius scientist and he is still mentioned a lot in schools, various media, ...
Turbots 14y ago
You can safely add Robert Cailliau ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau ) to the list of inventors of the WWW, since he created it together with Tim Berners-Lee.
dimitar 14y ago
I'm a bit disappointed that none of Keynes ideas were present, and there are good contenders: * Unemployment is a involuntary, but there are solutions to it. * Economic crises can be significantly mitigated and avoided with regulation. * Forcing a heavy reparations burden on Germany will undermine peace. They replaced the previous set of ideas that were more about assigning blame (crises are a retribution for mistakes and should be allowed to continue, unemployment is voluntary and Germany must pay). Without his influence, the world will be a much different place. Much more than the WWW which is simply one of many possible layers on the Internet.
naughtysriram 14y ago
I don't buy that aristotle’s logic, euclid’s geometry and hell newton's physics shit.
blackhole 14y ago
The explanation of Godel's incompleteness theorem is extremely bad in this post. It simply states that a logical system that is consistent can't prove everything, and if it ever does prove everything it can only do so by being inconsistent. Likewise, a logical system cannot be used to prove it's own consistency. Basically it just means if you want to prove that a logical system is consistent, you need to use a more powerful logical system, and you can't formulate a consistent logical system that proves everything. It has absolutely goddamned nothing to do with failing, unless you consider a logical system only succeeding when it has proven everything in the universe, including its own consistency, which is just silly. We don't NEED to do that. His theorem is of extreme importence in proofs and mathematics, because it means that one can't prove that math is consistent using math, but it has nothing to do with computer programs /crashing/. That is a gross misinterpretation. It's made worse because all computer programs COULD crash simply because they are implemented on imperfect devices. But this has nothing to do with Godel's theorem, it has to do with physical limitations. Saying Godel's theorem proves all programs eventually crash is like saying Einstein's relativity is why time moves slower when you're bored.

19 points by denzil_correa 14y ago

We had some really good ideas before history too, like trade, agriculture, sailing, and animal domestication.

> Not since Aristotle has such an important theory sprung forth from one man, seemingly out of thin air I'm skeptical. Not to make light of the formalization of information theory, but it seems he was generalizing the idea that you can communicate arbitrary information using code. As inspirations for this generalization, he was able to draw upon several existing examples of such systems, including Hollerith's punch card system that had been around for half a century by that point.

lispm 14y ago

> every logical system will fail and every computer program will crash that's bullshit.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- lispm 14y ago
  in Computer Science and probably Philosophy Kurt Gödel is well known. But outside of that I guess that most people never heard of him. Einstein OTOH is the prototype of the genius scientist and he is still mentioned a lot in schools, various media, ...

Turbots 14y ago

You can safely add Robert Cailliau ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau ) to the list of inventors of the WWW, since he created it together with Tim Berners-Lee.

dimitar 14y ago

I'm a bit disappointed that none of Keynes ideas were present, and there are good contenders: * Unemployment is a involuntary, but there are solutions to it. * Economic crises can be significantly mitigated and avoided with regulation. * Forcing a heavy reparations burden on Germany will undermine peace. They replaced the previous set of ideas that were more about assigning blame (crises are a retribution for mistakes and should be allowed to continue, unemployment is voluntary and Germany must pay). Without his influence, the world will be a much different place. Much more than the WWW which is simply one of many possible layers on the Internet.

naughtysriram 14y ago

I don't buy that aristotle’s logic, euclid’s geometry and hell newton's physics shit.

blackhole 14y ago

The explanation of Godel's incompleteness theorem is extremely bad in this post. It simply states that a logical system that is consistent can't prove everything, and if it ever does prove everything it can only do so by being inconsistent. Likewise, a logical system cannot be used to prove it's own consistency. Basically it just means if you want to prove that a logical system is consistent, you need to use a more powerful logical system, and you can't formulate a consistent logical system that proves everything. It has absolutely goddamned nothing to do with failing, unless you consider a logical system only succeeding when it has proven everything in the universe, including its own consistency, which is just silly. We don't NEED to do that. His theorem is of extreme importence in proofs and mathematics, because it means that one can't prove that math is consistent using math, but it has nothing to do with computer programs /crashing/. That is a gross misinterpretation. It's made worse because all computer programs COULD crash simply because they are implemented on imperfect devices. But this has nothing to do with Godel's theorem, it has to do with physical limitations. Saying Godel's theorem proves all programs eventually crash is like saying Einstein's relativity is why time moves slower when you're bored.