Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful

(okmij.org)

38 points | by matt_d 2 hours ago

3 comments

  • WillAdams 3 minutes ago
    For an accessible introduction before beginning this, consider his _Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy_:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Mathematical_P...

    and for ease of reading see the various PDF versions at:

    https://people.umass.edu/klement/imp/

  • voidhorse 2 minutes ago
    I have a copy and like it much. However, i was always partial to Frege's Begriffschrift. His notation was really creative. It's a shame Russel's deflation of that project has sentenced it to the rubbish heap of history.
  • glimshe 1 hour ago
    If 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.
    • gumby 1 hour ago
      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.

      • voxadam 41 minutes ago
        >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 impenetrable book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

        • scubbo 0 minutes ago
          I'm surprised to hear that that was your perspective! I felt that it dealt with otherwise-opaque topics in a very approachable way.
        • m-hodges 29 minutes ago
          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.
          • voxadam 6 minutes ago
            It's been years since I cracked open a copy, maybe I should give it another shot.
        • analog31 33 minutes ago
          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.
    • keltor 25 minutes ago
      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.

      • derrida 6 minutes ago
        No it's not.

        No it wasn't.

        And you did not read it.

    • kjellsbells 35 minutes ago
      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?
      • inigyou 19 minutes ago
        apocryphally a typesetter saw "make x as small as possible" at the end of a math problem to be typeset, and did exactly that