The Annotated Gödel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness

Does what it says on the tin, and contains only one typo that I spotted, so that's good.

However, this really *is* just an annotation of Gödel's paper, with very little added. In particular, there are no proper worked-through examples to provide a context for all the logic proofs, so at the end of the day, unless the reader is already familiar with the subject, he or she is likely to be left wondering, "OK, but so what?".

And one minor nitpick: for reasons that are unstated, the author has chosen to replace Gödel's original multiplication operator (.) with a centred dot; this leads to places where, for those of us who are from a country that use the same convention as Germany, and a centred dot has quite a different meaning, the text is show more harder to follow than it should be. I can't imagine why, if he felt the need to change the glyph used for the multiplication operator, he didn't use the ordinary "times" symbol (×) instead, since, as far as I know, that is unambiguous, at least in the relevant context.

Perhaps I'm being unfair: the author does a great job of rendering the original paper into comprehensible English, including switching Gödel's idiosyncratic naming into something much more accessible to an English speaker. Maybe that was all that he intended to do. But the subtitle if the book is "A Reader's Guide...", and this particular reader was expecting something rather less arcane, bridging the gap between the original paper and a hypothetical non-expert reader who wasn't already familiar with the subject. show less

Kurt Gödel was a mathematician. His work changed our understanding of mathematics. The Annotated Gödel is a book by Hal Prince. In the book, Prince explains Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems section by section. Prince also provides a new translation of the book that modernizes the text.

The Incompleteness Theorems are statements that proclaim their incompleteness. Gödel invented a method called Gödel Numbering and used arithmetic to provide proof. It's akin to saying this sentence is false.

Prince's book is not for the layman, but it does make Gödel's statements and methods more straightforward.

I enjoyed the book. It still wasn't easy to understand, but I did enjoy it. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.