(www.theguardian.com)
Officially (i.e. in schools teaching stenography, back in the day) it was long ago replaced by "unified German shorthand" (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift IIRC), but he always considered Gabelsberger to be superior.
Well, maybe he too was one of the 6 people in the world who could read it (or yes, maybe that was hyperbole, I'm not sure) :D
The question the public wondered about the most was the loophole Gödel claimed to have found in the US Constitution, but they didn't find anything about that.[1]
There's a cool suspense novel "The God Proof" about finding a lost Gödel notebook extending Gödel's ontological "proof" of the existence of God.[2]
0. John Dawson (a logician) and his wife whose name I think is Cheryl (not sure). John Dawson later wrote the Gödel biography "Logical Dilemmas".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_loophole
2. https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/gp/God_Proof.pdf
> highly probably
Ah, the optimism of today’s youth!
It's really cool how AI is just able to decipher these and validate them with automated theorem provers. Crazy times!
If one could wish for a best case publishing, I would like to have the page scans side by side with the German reading side by side with the English translation with running commentary by the research group.
[1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50487434 , thanks empath75
How would you happen write a comment that is so utterly similar to your [dead] sibling comment?
> to a computer the letter "c" is completely unrecognizable no concept of the letter or the shape etc. If you train an ocr algorithm to detect pixels in the shape of "c" you can teach the computer to read the letter. what is so complicated about these squiggles that you think a computer couldn't be trained to read them? Have you seen written text in other languages? It looks "completely unrecognizable"
It feels too similar to even be AI generated. Or is the temperature set way down?
Also, could the people that for whatever reason cannot be stopped from running commenting agents (it's against HN policy btw.) please at least use models that aren't dumb? Yes, it is because it is shorthand. At least read the sources I'm quoting, dear agent.
I’d suggest you bake it into that header line on writtten by; something like this (but edited depending how ai was used):
“Written without AI assistance by the speakers and attendees of AIE Code Summit 2026 ”
Plus, Jan von Plato is the world's leading expert on Gödel -- the number of people who can read Gödel's handwriting can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and I think that every single one is part of Jan von Plato's research group. If he is excited about the output, this is a huge deal.
I wonder what tactics this used, so that I can leverage in my own work.
> Von Plato said he had started his Gödel project in 2017 because he was facing mandatory retirement from Helsinki University. “What should I do to make myself indispensable? Oh yes, I’ll start reading Gödel’s enigmatic shorthand pages!” He received a €2.5m (£2.1m) grant from the European Research Council, taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand – “I am one of only six people who can read it in the world” – and assembled a small team.
I'd think there would be more competition to lead studies and receive grants now that the workbooks are accessible to a wider audience of logicians
Compare him to those who are burning tokens to generate cringeworthy AI slop on social media. The value of a tool depends on the skill of the user.
Someone is still driving these studies, and probably will be for a while. Or maybe not. But still we can reward this guy for opening up this can of theorems that had before.
Silliest case: Imagine a dusty basement terminal screen open to claude code with "There we go! Cancer is cured as you requested, let me know and I'll send off the results" and nobody is around to approve it.
This is probably my favourite part of the article. On brand.
genius often comes with side effects
> Following Adele's admission to hospital after suffering a stroke in late 1977, Gödel refused to eat in her absence; he weighed 29 kilograms (65 lb) when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Gödel#Personal_life_and_d...
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bruce-C.-Berndt/author/B001HN3...
It would be interesting to point Fable or Argon at the notebooks and see if they can find some interesting new material in or based on this work.
This has been a problem long before Godel: famously, Newton tried to get credit for inventing Calculus only after Leibniz published his work, leading to a bitter dispute that lasted long after they both died.
I wonder if this problem is now going to be significantly exacerbated by AI, as mathematicians are getting more incentives to keep their works secret —
— or, to the contrary, the community will get a push to publish incomplete ideas, scratch work, etc. early to establish a record of thinking about a problem before others did.
In the end, as always, it's a social problem created by " publish or perish " institutional incentives which reward (and require!) published results, but not the work that led to to them.
This, I hope, will finally change.
The AI was of course trained on existing pre-AI transcriptions of Goedel's shorthand, which he was taught in school around 1920 and which was widespread and only technically "obsolete".
In the second paragraph, we have what appears to be a claim that the model knows how to read Gödel's shorthand because it has been exposed to past examples of that shorthand. What is your point here? I think the model learning to generalize by training on a few examples is a point in its favor.
Ergo all defined axiomatic systems have sentences about the far past and future that cannot be defined in those languages with certainty. Most do not make the connection to physics. Gödel did and would 100% aware the limits exist and will always exist
Scaling laws aren't just for computers; humans cultures do not scale infinitely through time, just approximately 2-3 generations
As I understand immutable physical truth like this played a huge role in his early research and ultimately were the forcing function that led him to incompleteness
This is often misunderstood or misstated to mean that there are some things that are unknowable or unable to be solved. (I'm not saying that's what you were implying, I am referring to the common way I see his theorem being represented)
But what he really proved is that no single sufficiently powerful, consistent, effectively specified formal system can prove every arithmetic truth.
He didn't prove that there are mathematical truths that are unsolvable through any possible extension or alternative framework. It's just that one framework isn't enough to solve all problems.
Scaling issues do not just matter when making bridges and when hosting LLMs.
Back in Gödel's day physicists were like rockstars and all Gödel's output was 100% influenced by Einstein and the rest. Given the group's expertise in the domain the implicitly forever incomplete/never computed did not need to be spelled out explicitly.
Do better.