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Kurt Gödel Centenary

I studied about Gödel numbers in Theory of Computing class bac in MMU. I still remember, all of us didn’t know how to pronounce Gödel’s name correctly, until Michael Hartwig our german lecturer taught us how. I didn’t know he was Austrian until I got to know about this centenary celebration and the Kurt Gödel Research Prize fellowships.

A little background about Gödel:

One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel’s work has had immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when many, such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead and David Hilbert, were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.
Gödel is best known for his two incompleteness theorems, published in 1931 when he was 25 years of age, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The more famous incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the naturals that cannot be proved from the axioms. To prove this theorem, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. (taken from Wikipedia)

As Computational Logic students, my classmates and I were invited to be a part of the Prize Fellowship Colloqium and followed by the gala dinner.

The highlight to us was of course the gala dinner held at the Museum of Natural History. It was a five course dinner, followed by a guided roof top tour of the museum. This is the second time all of us were so dressed up, since the TU ball.

Tomer pointed out that our group conversation was probably the one with the lowest intellectual level among all the groups. I bet some of the professors or researchers are busy discussing and giving their personal views on the million dollar problem: is P= NP?
I totally agree with Tomer. During the lunch break of the colloqium, we had the following talk:
“wow, the food is great. I am stuffed. I probably should stop and reserve some space for tonight’s gala dinner.”
“ya…since lunch is so good, i think the gala dinner will definitely be better.”
“You know, there’s going to be 2 hours break, the prize giving event ends at 5pm and dinner starts at 7pm. You can go jogging during the break, to get your appetite back!”
“Hahah…good idea”
“Hey, we still have 20 minutes before they start again, let’s go to the nearby park for a walk”
“Ok, let’s go”.

******Don’t blame us, we’re just students =p

Here’s a tribute to my classmates. It’s really an honor to get to know u guys.

Kurt Gödel Centenary Celebration