[FOM] Simple historical question
Richard Heck
rgheck at brown.edu
Tue Jul 24 00:51:42 EDT 2007
H. Enderton wrote:
> As for your pedagogical point, I quite agree. Now that we have a robust
> theory of computability, I think we can say that the heart of Goedel's
> first incompleteness theorem lies in the fact that true arithmetic is
> not computably enumerable. Of course, in 1931 the computability concepts
> were unavailable.
>
I've always liked the way Boolos and Jeffrey do this. The core theorem
is: No consistent extension of Q is decidable. All the other classical
results then follow.
Richard
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Richard G Heck, Jr
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Brown University
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