[lbo-talk] Review of Badiou's Number and Numbers

[Chuck Grimes]

This is just a side note. For lbosters interested in Goedel, I've got
his collected works. He is highly readabe and accessible in many of
these papers. The first volumn covers his work up to 1938. Volume 2
covers 1938 to 1974. The works have all sorts of short commentary and
set math on most of the famous set theory mathematicians who were
contemporaries. He also has re-worked approaches to relativity and its
internal math. I think in these latter papers he is trying to find a
mathematical way to join or combined the smoothness of the relativistic
cosmologies with the finite, chunkie world of quantum. 

There's a paper on the Turning recursion hypothesis that attempts to
demonstrate how the human mine might be able to beat recursion. Or
rather how recursions can be shown to not be characterize mathematics as
practiced by humans...or something like that.

He was a very imaginative and interesting writer. In other words he was
a mathematical philosopher who speculated with mathematical ideas. I
usually couldn't quite follow him all the way down in most instances,
and of course I didn't know enough to quite grasp the implications. But
it was sure fun to try, and to try to follow how his mind worked.

CG