In this week’s Mind Matters episode, Robert J. Marks begins a conversation with mathematician and computer scientist Gregory Chaitin. The two discuss Chaitin’s beginnings in computer science, his thoughts on historic scientists in his field such as Leonard Euler and Kurt Gödel, and even the story of how a cold call to Gödel almost led to Chaitin meeting the famed German-Austrian logician, mathematician, and philosopher in person.

Show Notes

• 00:23 | Introducing Gregory Chaitin
• 05:00 | Chaitin’s Youth
• 06:33 | Chaitin’s journey to computer science
• 08:26 | Chaitin’s thoughts on Leonard Euler
• 12:42 | Chaitin’s near brush with Kurt Gödel
• 17:16 | The quirks of Gödel

Additional Resources

• Gregory Chaitin’s Website
• Unravelling Complexity: The Life and Work of Gregory Chaitin, edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Francisco Antonio Doria
• Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of Reason by Gregory J. Chaitin
• Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega by Gregory Chaitin
• Thinking About Gödel and Turing: Essays on Complexity by Gregory J. Chaitin
• Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical by Gregory Chaitin
• “On the Length of Programs for Computing Finite Binary Sequences” by Gregory J. Chaitin, written and published when he was a teenager
• Leonard Euler, Swiss mathematician and physicist
• Kurt Gödel, Austrian-born mathematician
• Georg Cantor, German mathematician
• Dr. Robert J. Marks’ critiques of Gregory Chaitin’s ideas on Youtube
• “Active Information in Metabiology“: Winston Ewert’s, William Dembski’s, and Robert J. Marks’ paper on Chaitin’s metabiology