Hilbert, Turing, & Pynchon

[Ghetta Life]

I realized the connection between the three might get lost in the last post, 
so I edited it for clarity.  But read the whole New Yorker book review...

>From: "Ghetta Life" <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com>
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon
>
>It has been rumored that Pynchon's next book will be about the life  and 
>love stories of Sofia Kovalevskaya, whom he allegedly studied in Germany. 
>The former German minister of culture Michael Naumann has stated that he 
>assisted Pynchon in his research about "a Russian mathematician that 
>studied for    *David Hilbert*    in Göttingen". >
>
>http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?060206crbo_books
>
>The decision problem asks, in essence, whether reasoning can be reduced to 
>computation. That was the dream of the  seventeenth-century philosopher    
>**Gottfried von Leibniz,**    who imagined a calculus of reason that would 
>permit disagreements to be resolved by taking pen in hand and saying, 
>Calculemus—“Let us calculate.”
[...]  Such a method would be particularly useful to mathematicians, since 
it would allow them to resolve many of the conundrums in their field—like 
Fermat’s last theorem, or Goldbach’s conjecture—by brute force. That is why  
  * *David Hilbert,**    who in 1928 challenged the mathematical community 
to solve the decision problem, called it “the principal problem of 
mathematical logic.”
>
>Turing was able to do some amazing things with his abstract devices, which 
>soon became known as “Turing machines.” [...]  Turing was able to prove 
>that no computing machine of the kind he envisaged could solve the decision 
>problem. Reasoning could not be reduced to computation after all.
>

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