From what historians of science tell us, Gödel was in any case an absolute perfectionist who mostly published work that was bulletproof. His enormous body of notes surely contained some very sharp insights, but it is unlikely that he would have produced illuminating, conclusive new theorems by chance and without realizing it. He was a very harsh reviewer of his own work.
Maybe it's likely that he didn't have proofs, but surely had all kinds of theorems with at the very least some intuition of a proof. Recall that he wouldn't have had the same huge breadth and depth of mathematical machinery available to him that we have now.
The stuff about Gabelsberger shorthand sounds ludicrous to me. My father would write notes in a custom version of it until his death 2020.
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
I can't remember the exact quote but I believe I read that Gödel confided to Einstein (in their walks in Princeton) on his deep worry of his work being forgotten. If only he knew.
Have you seen the manuscripts? Take a look at slide 10 of https://aitp-conference.org/2026/slides/JvP.pdf [1]. On slide 12 you can at least make out a few words (even before reading the English translation I could clearly read "Jede" and "Systems ist berechenbar"), but any part of the shorthand is completely unrecognizable. Also take a look at slide 6 that shows a bunch of word transcriptions in the shorthand. If I understood the article correctly, you have to intimately know the math involved to have any chance of decoding the content, as there is a lot of interpretation involved.
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.
This is incredibly exciting! Gödel is unquestionably the most important logician in history, but unfortunately he published very little. For instance, the Dialectica interpretation was published approximately 20 years after his first ideas on the subject.
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.
The problem with Linear A is that we don't have a reference point like the Rosetta Stone to anchor it to other languages and scripts. It also has a small corpus, making it hard to find patterns in the texts.
I wonder how much expertise was actually needed to translate these notebooks. In other words, could a general purpose model one-shot these translations, or did we really need a subject matter expert to do the work? BTW - I'm not saying having a subject matter expert tackle the problem with Claude isn't useful - just wondering what the limits are!
This might be an actual concrete example of someone making themselves obsolete with AI.
> 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 think you're missing my point. It's that once the workbooks are completely interpreted, which is happening at an accelerated pace thanks to AI, von Plato's value as an interpreter of the short hand becomes severely reduced, presumably as does his ability to get future grants.
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
If he was facing mandatory retirement nearly ten years ago it’s likely he might be ready for voluntary retirement, particularly after achieving this fantastic result.
The professor's value was/is in being one of a few people with the capability of interpreting the shorthand. By translating it with AI, his value as an interpreter begins evaporating as the translated workbooks become accessible to more logicians.
It's clear though. Even if an AI had connected all the dots on the obsolete shorthand, it would never have recognized the human value. I doubt that any AI process would choose to spend the energy on interpreting this particular obsolete handwriting and then understand that it was from the hand of a genius.
Using AI to do your job does not mean that AI suddenly walks in the door and escorts you out and starts collecting your paycheck.
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.
"You don't get credit for the work you don't tell anybody about"
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.
Maybe we'll see a solid societal use case for zero-knowledge proofs here, establishing one had a set of documents at a given date without revealing them.
At least that's how traditional Western universities used to work. The profs sometimes published something, and they taught students. Looking at science back then, it seemed to work out rather well.
This extra detail makes the story even sadder, imo:
> 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
Nice timing for the IPO. Cooked Nvidia numbers on the 17th are still missing, and the 19th will go well!
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 first paragraph, we have an evidence-free insinuation that the foremost expert on this subject is some kind of shill running a campaign for Anthropic. What does this campaign involve? Is he just making it all up? Let me hear your theory of what is happening here and how it invalidates the claimed abilities of the model (or why the abilities do not matter).
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.
"Unlocks" cool so Claude the trillion dollar technology did what any funded researcher with a computer vision algorithm could have done years ago. Wow so impressive.
Why? His incompleteness work explains why software and math suck so he would already expect them to; they're rhetorical and can never fully be a closed loop body of knowledge as we can never with rhetoric concretely observe/define the far future or far past; merely simulate rhetorically
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
"all defined axiomatic systems have sentences about the far past and future that cannot be defined in those languages with certainty."
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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".
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-67606-3
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.
Do better.
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.