A Revolutionary Century in Logic: Boole to Gödel

Presented (in person!) by Chris Goad

The century from the 1840s to 1930s was a time of revolution for logic. In 1847 Boole published his propositional logic. Next came Cantor's set theory (1874) with its hierarchy of infinities. Fast-forward to Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatic set theory (1922), which made it possible to write down a foundation for essentially all of mathematics in a page or two. Capping it off were Gödel's incompleteness theorems (1930), which showed that no formal system can capture mathematical truth. The presentation will describe the major developments of this period.

Reading: https://cgdoc.s3.amazonaws.com/logic.html