Officially (i.e. in schools teaching stenography, back in the day) it was long ago replaced by "unified German shorthand" (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift IIRC), but he always considered Gabelsberger to be superior.
Well, maybe he too was one of the 6 people in the world who could read it (or yes, maybe that was hyperbole, I'm not sure) :D
If one could wish for a best case publishing, I would like to have the page scans side by side with the German reading side by side with the English translation with running commentary by the research group.
[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50487434 , thanks empath75
Plus, Jan von Plato is the world's leading expert on Gödel -- the number of people who can read Gödel's handwriting can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and I think that every single one is part of Jan von Plato's research group. If he is excited about the output, this is a huge deal.
I wonder what tactics this used, so that I can leverage in my own work.
> Von Plato said he had started his Gödel project in 2017 because he was facing mandatory retirement from Helsinki University. “What should I do to make myself indispensable? Oh yes, I’ll start reading Gödel’s enigmatic shorthand pages!” He received a €2.5m (£2.1m) grant from the European Research Council, taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand – “I am one of only six people who can read it in the world” – and assembled a small team.
I'd think there would be more competition to lead studies and receive grants now that the workbooks are accessible to a wider audience of logicians
Someone is still driving these studies, and probably will be for a while. Or maybe not. But still we can reward this guy for opening up this can of theorems that had before.
Silliest case: Imagine a dusty basement terminal screen open to claude code with "There we go! Cancer is cured as you requested, let me know and I'll send off the results" and nobody is around to approve it.
This has been a problem long before Godel: famously, Newton tried to get credit for inventing Calculus only after Leibniz published his work, leading to a bitter dispute that lasted long after they both died.
I wonder if this problem is now going to be significantly exacerbated by AI, as mathematicians are getting more incentives to keep their works secret —
— or, to the contrary, the community will get a push to publish incomplete ideas, scratch work, etc. early to establish a record of thinking about a problem before others did.
In the end, as always, it's a social problem created by " publish or perish " institutional incentives which reward (and require!) published results, but not the work that led to to them.
This, I hope, will finally change.
genius often comes with side effects
> Following Adele's admission to hospital after suffering a stroke in late 1977, Gödel refused to eat in her absence; he weighed 29 kilograms (65 lb) when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Gödel#Personal_life_and_d...
The AI was of course trained on existing pre-AI transcriptions of Goedel's shorthand, which he was taught in school around 1920 and which was widespread and only technically "obsolete".
In the second paragraph, we have what appears to be a claim that the model knows how to read Gödel's shorthand because it has been exposed to past examples of that shorthand. What is your point here? I think the model learning to generalize by training on a few examples is a point in its favor.
Ergo all defined axiomatic systems have sentences about the far past and future that cannot be defined in those languages with certainty. Most do not make the connection to physics. Gödel did and would 100% aware the limits exist and will always exist
Scaling laws aren't just for computers; humans cultures do not scale infinitely through time, just approximately 2-3 generations
As I understand immutable physical truth like this played a huge role in his early research and ultimately were the forcing function that led him to incompleteness
This is often misunderstood or misstated to mean that there are some things that are unknowable or unable to be solved. (I'm not saying that's what you were implying, I am referring to the common way I see his theorem being represented)
But what he really proved is that no single sufficiently powerful, consistent, effectively specified formal system can prove every arithmetic truth.
He didn't prove that there are mathematical truths that are unsolvable through any possible extension or alternative framework. It's just that one framework isn't enough to solve all problems.