On Thursday, December 5, 2002, at 06:50 AM, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

Jim Choate wrote:

No he didn't. He proved Mathematics is incomplete, ie that there are universally valid but unprovable statements within it.

He proved that any system that contains Peano arithmetic (roughly, a concept of the natural numbers) is incomplete. Mathematics certainly contains Peano arithmetic.

Go and lie down. Your brain is feverish. And stop posting nonsense.

I believe you, Peter, are fairly new to the list. At least I have only been seeing a lot of posts from you recently. So, you being new, you apparently don't know that Jim Choate is a visitor from Choate Prime, a reality which is parallel to our own but "different" in many strange, but ultimately boring, ways. In Choate Prime, the laws of physics are quite different from our own. In Choate Prime, the prime numbers (the so-called Choate Prime primes, or CPPs) have substantially different properties than they have in our world. Mathematics and logic are generally quite different in Choate Prime than here on Earth. In Choate Prime, naturally, history and law are substantially different from what we here on Earth see. Many of us have found various ways to disconnect the signals coming in from Choate Prime. We see his signals only in the replies of others who have not yet realized what kind of weird place Choate Prime is. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/ML/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns Recent interests: category theory, toposes, algebraic topology