If anyone wants to go, I doubt that you have to be an official member of WESS to attend. You are required to buy dinner, however. Dave --------- forwarded message follows -------------------- Dear WESSers: The next general dinner meeting is scheduled for March 1, 1994, at Jacques Cafe, 4001 Fairfax Drive in Arlington, VA. The schedule for the evening is as usual: Cocktails at 6:00PM, Dinner at 7:00 PM and the talk at about 8:15 PM. The speaker is Dr. Gregory Chaitin of Watson Research Laboratories of International Business Corporation. Dr. Chaitin is internationally recognized for his work on theories of randomness. ( The tensions between the traditional theories of randomness and the emerging theories of nonlinear deterministic behavior should prove to be stimulating.) The following dinner meeting will be held on March 28th, 1994. The speaker will be Dr. Ben Weems who will discuss "The Evolution of Cognitive Structures". Dr. Koichiro Matsuno (Professor of Biophysics, Nagaoka University) will be visiting the Washington area from March 27, 1994 to March 29, 1994. He is interested in meeting with WESS members during that period. Please drop me a note so that I can arrange a mutually agreeable schedule or contact him directly via Internet at (kmatsuno@voscc.nagaokaut.ac.jp). Jerry Abstract ================================================================== THE LIMITS OF MATHEMATICS G. J. Chaitin IBM Research Division P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 chaitin@watson.ibm.com One normally thinks that everything that is true is true for a reason. I've found mathematical truths that are true for no reason at all. These mathematical truths are beyond the power of mathematical reasoning because they are accidental and random. ===================== GREGORY CHAITIN is a member of the computer science department at the IBM Watson Research Center in New York. In the mid 1960s, when he was a teenager, he created algorithmic information theory, which combines, among other elements, Shannon's information theory and Turing's theory of computability. In the three decades since then he has been the principal architect of the theory. Among his contributions are the definition of a random sequence via algorithmic incompressibility, and his information-theoretic approach to Godel's incompleteness theorem. His work on Hilbert's 10th problem has shown that in a sense there is randomness in arithmetic, in other words, that God not only plays dice in quantum mechanics and nonlinear dynamics, but even in elementary number theory. He is the author of three books: ALGORITHMIC INFORMATION THEORY published by Cambridge University Press, and INFORMATION, RANDOMNESS & INCOMPLETENESS and INFORMATION-THEORETIC INCOMPLETENESS, both published by World Scientific. = vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv Jerry LR Chandler, Ph.D. Phone: 301-496-1846 Epilepsy Br. National Inst Health Fax 301-496-9916 Bethesda, Maryland 20892 Home 703-790-1651 chandler@casa.ninds.nih.gov OR chandler@helix.nih.gov vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv