the missing umlaut on Gödel's gravestone

Gernot Salzer gernot.salzer at tuwien.ac.at
Tue Dec 22 13:20:34 EST 2020


I'm not informed about Mr Hartford's qualification in logic, but he
apparently was sufficiently knowledgable to realize that this speck left
above the O didn't qualify as an umlaut, not even as a hungarumlaut
(which would be wrong, too). It may not be obvious that o, ö, ő, ô, ...
are all different letters, but they are. This is not a typographical
issue.

Kudos to Mr Hartford for setting Gödel's name right (even though there
are certainly more pressing problems than correcting this spelling).

Gernot

On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 11:39:32PM +0000, Michael Barany wrote:
> Does anyone with an IAS connection know any of the other sides of the story of how a random lawyer / skincare entrepreneur / Godel fan with an "Eternal Past Conjecture" that looks ripped from the crackpot files of 20th century mathematical archives managed to get permission ot alter a gravestone because he disagreed with the typography? Seems incredible to me that, as he reports it, he could have done so with the IAS's support.
> 
> (Note, contra Martin Davis's summary, that the umlaut was not "missing" but rather engraved in a style --- presumably approved by the executors who arranged the original burial --- that the headstone vigilante, and probably many on this list, found unfamiliar.)
> 
> Michael
> 
> And so it came to pass that at 17:00 on Sunday the 20 of December in the year 2020, fom-request at cs.nyu.edu did declare: 
> > Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2020 09:09:49 -0800
> > From: Martin Davis <martin.david.davis at gmail.com>
> > To: fom at cs.nyu.edu
> > Subject: the missing umlaut on G?del's gravestone
> > Message-ID:
> > <CA+cpueJTs0f-aWVgtJZt7u8=NuMki77J9j603jt=8fCBGp9h9g at mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> > 
> > Andrew Hartford's story telling how he got the missing umlaut  placed on
> > the gravestone for Kurt and Adele G?del'
> > https://andrewhartford.medium.com/on-arguments-and-arguants-reason-reasoning-and-reasoners-46036a26a848


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