On a new ID the Future episode, we’re pleased to feature a cross-post from our sister site, Mind Matters. Here host Robert J. Marks begins a conversation with trailblazing Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist Gregory Chaitin. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
The two discuss Chaitin’s beginnings in computer science, his growing up in the 1960s a stone’s throw from Central Park, his thoughts on historic scientists in his field such as Leonard Euler and Kurt Gödel, and the story of Chaitin’s cold-calling the famed German-Austrian logician, mathematician, and philosopher, and how a snowstorm and Gödel’s quirky personality thwarted a meeting. Also touched on: Gödel’s ontological proof for the existence of God and how children can be said to have solved Chaitin’s incompleteness problem.