Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

June 19, 2004

reading

Filed under: Uncategorized — Muli Ben-Yehuda @ 11:34 AM

Just finished Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor, which was riveting, and am now reading Chaitin’s latest work, META MATH.

3 Comments »

  1. Ugh. The “metamath” thingy looks like a piece of crap with bad writing (unneeded commas which really hurt the flow) and sucky math like

    It is usually better not to consider 1 a prime, for
    technical reasons

    [For reference, 1 is not a prime because the definition of a prime is “something which is not a unit and has no divisors”, and it is just a coincidence that in the whole numbers (which is a much more appropriate setting to discuss prime numbers) only 1 and -1 are units. For example, in the polynomial ring, all order-0 polynomials are units, and not prime.]

    Comment by moshez — June 19, 2004 @ 3:14 AM | Reply

    • I’m afraid I have to agree with you… it looks like META MATH is written for a “popular” audience, and badly needs editing. I’ve read some of Chaitin’s other works (e.g. The Limits of Mathematics) when I was in the Technion, and from what I can recall, it was much better.

      Comment by mulix — June 20, 2004 @ 12:32 AM | Reply

      • Well, then, I’ll try to keep an open mind about him 🙂

        Comment by moshez — June 20, 2004 @ 1:42 AM


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