Goedel's Way

The G del incompleteness phenomenon is usually presented in textbooks as something that happens in the rarefied realms of mathematical logic, and has nothing to do with the real world. It is not so. Based on Chaitin 's groundbreaking work and on the da Costa-Doria results in physics, ecology, economics and computer science, this book shows that it can directly bear on the practice of science and perhaps on our everyday life. This new accessible book gives a new detailed and elementary proof of the G del incompleteness theorems and then presents the Chaitin results and their relation to the da Costa-Doria results, which are given in full, but with no technicalities. Besides theory, the lively historical report and personal stories about the main character and the process of writing this volume, make it appealing leisure reading for those interested in mathematics, logic, physics, philosophy and computer sciences.