[HN Gopher] From Trotsky to Godel: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort
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       From Trotsky to Godel: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort
        
       Author : apollinaire
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2020-12-30 19:35 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
        
       | tus88 wrote:
       | One of the strangest communists you've never heard of.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker
         | News? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we're
         | trying for a different sort of thing here.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
       | dang wrote:
       | This is an excellent article by the estimable Ray Monk. I've
       | pinched the title of a biography he mentions to serve as the
       | headline, since it's accurate and not baity.
        
       | jonsneyers wrote:
       | I had actually heard of him before. A philosophy professor once
       | told me about him when I told him I was a Trotskyist.
        
         | the-dude wrote:
         | Are you a nihilist now? Just asking.
        
       | yters wrote:
       | I like how the proletariat revolution is always instigated and
       | led by members of the bourgeoisie.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological tangents,
         | which turn into generic ideological flamewars, which are one
         | thing we really don't want here.
         | 
         | https://hn.algolia.com/?query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang&da...
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
         | 
         | This is a surprisingly great and interesting article. The last
         | thing we need in such a thread is people angrily yelling
         | cliches at each other, drowning out the details.
        
           | yters wrote:
           | Do we regularly feature Nazi philosophers on HN? If not, why
           | not?
        
       | bjornsing wrote:
       | "He also helped to edit the papers of Kurt Godel, known for his
       | famous (and famously difficult) Incompleteness Theorems, _which
       | establish that there can be no consistent axiomatic theory of
       | logic from which the whole of mathematics can be derived_ , a man
       | who has been called the most important logician since Aristotle."
       | 
       | Godel's work is characterized like this all the time, like if he
       | proved that there is something magical about mathematics, as if
       | it's above and beyond logic. But that's not what Godel proved,
       | right?
       | 
       | My understanding is: All of mathematics can in principle be
       | derived from ZFC. Godel proved that there are mathematical
       | statements (conjectures) that are true but cannot be proven (in
       | ZFC). They are however, by definition, not theorems (in ZFC) and
       | not part of mathematics in any reasonable sense.
        
       | nahuel0x wrote:
       | Another interesting Trotsky bodyguard and secretary was Bernard
       | Wolfe, who wrote the s.f. book Limbo (1952):
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Wolfe
        
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       (page generated 2020-12-31 23:00 UTC)