Topic: GÖDEL'S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS

[toasty0]

This is some heady stuff. 'k, you can call me a geek.
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In 1900, in the German city of Königsberg, the International Congress of Mathematicians gathered in a mood of hope and fear. The edifice of maths was grand and ornate but its foundations, called axioms, were shaking with inconsistency and lurking paradox. And so, at that conference, a young man called David Hilbert set out a plan to rebuild them – to make them consistent, all encompassing and without any hint of a paradox.

Hilbert was one of the greatest mathematicians that ever lived, but his plan failed, spectacularly, and it did so because of the incompleteness theorems. These were the work of Kurt Gödel and they changed the way we understand maths, took us to the very limits of logic and sent challenges spilling out into the worlds of physics, philosophy and beyond.

Contributors

Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at Wadham College, University of Oxford

John Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Geometry

Philip Welch, Professor of Mathematical Logic at the University of Bristol

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml
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There's a pod cast too.