Incompleteness

:: rebecca @ island cafe ::

As it worked out, my surprise birthday present today was to hang out with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, our guest ISEPP lecturer, tonight rounding out the 2006-2007 series with a talk on incompleteness. Terry managed to schedule a quick lunch-focused trip on Captain Donzo's Meliptus, with me 'n Glenn on crew.

Rebecca did some hard time in 1879 Hall (Princeton's philo building), at the grad level (I was undergrad), escaping the limited options a trully orthodox Jewish curriculum could have provided a woman of her day. We gossiped and/or compared notes on a few of the big names for which Princeton is famous e.g. Kripke 'n Kaufmann.

Rebecca and I are both Sasha/Borat/AliG fans, so using my faux AliG voice I asked "if Gödel was on Myspace, who would his Myspace friends be?" Rebecca responded without hesitation: "Einstein and Leibniz." Me: "but Leibniz was dead." Rebecca: "They're all dead." At which point I broke character to speculate how three hundred years from now, Myspace might include as many dead as living (the info'd still be of historical interest no?).

Post lecture: Gödel would've nixed Wittgenstein as a Myspace friend at the time, especially as LW was being hailed as the god of logical positivism (a gross miscasting) whereas Gödel was into proving his brand of Platonism still held water. Rebecca: definitely one of Gödel's best Myspace friends.

:: rebecca chatting with nirel ::