Reading Godel’s 1946 Princeton Bicentennial Lecture

Juliette Kennedy
Professor of Mathematics
University of Helsinki

May 1, 2014, 3pm
MacQuarrie Hall 225
(Refreshments, MH210 at 2:30pm)

Abstract

In his 1946 Princeton Bicentennial Lecture Goedel suggested the problem of transferring the Turing analysis of computability to the cases of definability and provability, in particular finding a notion of definability for set theory which is “formalism free” in a sense similar to the notion of computable function — a notion which is very robust with respect to its various associated formalisms. In this lecture we examine this suggestion, as well as the developments in computability in the 1930s which set the stage for Goedel’s idea.