How can one man get BTFOd so hard?

...

>JUST

ITS NOT FAIR

...

fpbp desu

even pure relativism or skepticism is shit-tier, as paradoxical as it sounds

...

CRAWLING IN MY SKIN

is this a meme or an actual proof? i honestly can't tell

check for the actual proof

how many people in the world do you think have actually read the Principia? Skimming through the pages doesn't count.

>not mentioning that Pitts btfo Russell when he was 12 years old

200?
It's not meant to be read, but people prob read it (or tried to) to find errors anyway

I think that the "under a thousand" guess is probably reasonable. After all, we only include in this guess people who have read ALL THREE volumes, ALL THE WAY THROUGH. And the motivation to do something like this is greatly diminished for mathematicians when they know in a cursory way that the project was BTFO.

Still, the project has obvious importance in the history of math-we're talking about it, after all-and so there is a sheer curiosity to the thing. I actually hope to read it someday but I got stuck on a bit of Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy a while back and I haven't gone back at it.

I also seem to remember reading Gödel's paper and getting stuck on a bit about how his Gödel numbers are actually defined, like I inspected a few and they didn't seem to be what they were supposed to be, or something.

More about this?

it's something about how Russell was a pacifist and a passionate opponent of nuclear weapons. But he'd go so hard/edgy in his debates on same (or something like this) that an author of some note called him out for being "warlike, wanting to win at all costs" in his debates on the topic, which makes him a hypocrite or something.

The letter is rather scathing IIRC but I honestly don't think that the guy who wrote it has much of a valid point (from what I can remember). That type of thing is the "you're a hypocrite" sophistry which is commonly resorted to by humanities types.

I feel genuinely sad for the guy:

>Both Whitehead and I were disappointed that Principia Mathematica was only viewed from a philosophical standpoint. People were interested in what was said about the contradictions and in the question whether ordinary mathematics had been validly deduced from purely logical premisses, but they were not interested in the mathematical techniques developed in the course of the work. ... Even those who were working on exactly the same subjects did not think it worth while to find out what Principia Mathematica had to say on them. I will give two illustrations: Mathematische Annalen published about ten years after the publication of Principia a long article giving some of the results which (unknown to the author) we had worked out in Part IV of our book. This article fell into certain inaccuracies which we had avoided, but contained nothing valid which we had not already published. The author was obviously totally unaware that he had been anticipated. The second example occurred when I was a colleague of Reichenbach at the University of California. He told me that he had invented an extension of mathematical induction which he called 'transfinite induction'. I told him that this subject was fully treated in the third volume of the Principia. When I saw him a week later, he told me that he had verified this. (1959, 86)

plato.stanford.edu/entries/principia-mathematica/

>The first indication that something was seriously wrong appeared in Gödel's well known essay of 1944, “Russell's Mathematical Logic.” There, Gödel points out that line (3) of the demonstration of Russell's proposition *89.16 is an elementary logical blunder, while the crucial *89.12 also appears to be highly questionable. It still remained to be seen whether anything of Russell's proof could be salvaged, in spite of the errors, but John Myhill provided strong evidence of a negative verdict by providing a model-theoretic proof in 1974 that no such proof as Russell's can be given in the ramified theory of types without the axiom of reducibility. (Urquhart 2012)

plato.stanford.edu/entries/principia-mathematica/

>“There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”

goodreads.com/quotes/348475-there-was-a-footpath-leading-across-fields-to-new-southgate

Who's this?

>Who's this?
Marx.

Hitler, before he was denied entry in the art school

ur mum

Why did he want to kill himself what the fuck?

>Why did he want to kill himself what the fuck?

Imagine devoting all your time and effort to something that is ultimately useless. I'm sure you know that feeling so you should know why he wanted to kill him self

Everybody regards Russell's and Whitehead's efforts though as the beginning of more formalized/rigorous mathematics and away from faulty intuition of the time. Their efforts also set the Lambda Calculus/Church-Turing thesis in motion.

The irony is that Russell himself didn't really discover much interesting mathematics other than that paradox. He only got PM to work by fucking around with different axioms. He ended up having to assume something that made the whole type hierarchy pointless anyways.

fug

I HURT MYSELF TODAY.