Talk:Kurt Gödel

Most important?

The most important? Then what counts as "modern times"? Frege and Russell/Whitehead each have as strong a claim as Goedel. --Larry Sanger 10:03, 4 June 2008 (CDT)

For 'modern times', I was sort of meaning the 20th century.

As to the magnitude, I was echoing a quote I saw in the Stanford EP: "established, beyond comparison, as the most important logician of our times," Solomon Feferman (Feferman 1986). That article also describes Godel as having "founded the modern, metamathematical era in mathematical logic."

I would say he's definitely more important that Russell/Whitehead, because he proved that their whole system (and the whole Hilbert program) was to some degree built on quicksand. FWIWFor what it's worth, I would think Turing was more important (in terms of mathematical logic - to me, all computability/computing stuff is a subset of mathematical logic) than Russell/Whitehead, no? I mean, not just in everyday implications (computers), but also the whole computable numbers thing, the halting problem, yadda-yadda.

Frege I don't know so much about, maybe he's as important at Godel. J. Noel Chiappa 10:31, 4 June 2008 (CDT)