Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
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Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#2If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#3If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
You mean you don’t have a framed, signed, bug-bounty cheque from Alfred North Whitehead on your wall??
More seriously, there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#4If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
You mean you don’t have a framed, signed, bug-bounty cheque from Alfred North Whitehead on your wall?? More seriously, there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
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Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#5If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
You mean you don’t have a framed, signed, bug-bounty cheque from Alfred North Whitehead on your wall?? More seriously, there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
>there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
Which leads us to our next borderline impenetrable book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#6If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a thousand pages of APL symbols without introducing a bug?
Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean you don’t have a framed, signed, bug-bounty cheque from Alfred North Whitehead on your wall?? More seriously, there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
>there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel. Which leads us to our next borderline impenetrable book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
GEB was one of the books that inspired me to study math in college. It made math come to life in way that my high school courses didn't.
Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean you don’t have a framed, signed, bug-bounty cheque from Alfred North Whitehead on your wall?? More seriously, there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
>there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel. Which leads us to our next borderline impenetrable book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
I read GEB cover to cover and haven’t stopped thinking about it for years. Not a brag, a nudge that it’s not impenetrable and more people should read it.
Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#9If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
It was required reading for my Logics class in undergrad. Pretty sure it was also on the optionals (aka required) for my Set Theory class as well.
It's also pretty typically a part of History Of Mathematics and Philosophy of Mathematics courses.
Re: Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
#10If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a thousand pages of APL symbols without introducing a bug?
apocryphally a typesetter saw "make x as small as possible" at the end of a math problem to be typeset, and did exactly that