By the early 1900s stodgy Judging (in the MBTI sense) mathematicians had gotten somewhat tired of all the open ended creative antics of their P (ditto sense) collegues, and went on their usual hunt for "Closure". Or, true to the spirit of high level math, at least a proof that Closure could be attained in PRINCIPLE.Originally Posted by metaiwan
Godel showed that perfect closure was nowhere to find, except in severely limited pockets of the mathematicians universe. To the great sorrow of many people, including I guess the famous David Hilbert.
Both Hilbert and the Russel&Whitehead duo were at the time seeking this dream of frigid order in the conceptual universe.
A deep explanation of all this involves a scary subfield of math known as formal logic, about which I'm basically blank. A google or altavista search on "David Hilbert", "Kurt Godel", "Principia Mathematica", etc. will enlighten.
Greetings, ragnar


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