Courting again to historical Greece, the concept any mathematical assertion can in the end be confirmed true or false, and any obvious contradiction in the end erased, was as engaging because it was intuitive for a lot of logicians and mathematicians. Nevertheless, this long-dominant perception was upended within the early twentieth century when the logician Kurt Gödel transformed a written paradox – ‘This assertion can’t be proved’ – into an equation, shattering the notion that arithmetic may very well be constructed on constructions of complete certainty. This animation from TED-Ed traces how Gödel was in a position to make use of phrases to remodel arithmetic endlessly, and the way his ‘incompleteness theorem’ has led to breakthroughs in each his field and the digital world.
