Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of
Reason by Gregory Chaitin, Springer-Verlag, &egr;24.95, ISBN 1852335491
GREGORY CHAITIN must be a terrific lecturer! He makes all kinds of cute
remarks and little jokes (laughter)! And he loves exclamation marks!
This is a curious book. It reproduces three lectures by Chaitin, an IBM
mathematician, and intermingles them with interviews for television, magazines
and newspapers. The same handful of ideas gets explained, or not, a number of
times, in different ways.
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Yet I found it a curiously engaging and intelligent book, too. Chaitin鈥檚
obsession is metamathematics: arguments about the limitations of mathematics
itself, the incompleteness and undecidability that Kurt G枚del, Alan Turing
and Chaitin himself have brought to light. Chaitin鈥檚 contribution is a number
called omega, which has a nice, finite definition but whose digits are
unresolvably random.
Chaitin also chats about his upbringing in South and North America, his
youthful passion for mathematics and then girls. There鈥檚 something not quite
Feynmanesque going on here. He makes some brief, provocative remarks about
superstrings (more aesthetic than empirical) and artificial intelligence
(engineering, not mathematics).
Well, I鈥檓 not quite sure what this book is all about. I kind of liked it
though! Maybe you will too!