Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of
Reason by Gregory Chaitin, Springer-Verlag, &egr;24.95, ISBN 1852335491
GREGORY CHAITIN must be a terrific lecturer! He makes all kinds of cute
remarks and little jokes (laughter)! And he loves exclamation marks!
This is a curious book. It reproduces three lectures by Chaitin, an IBM
mathematician, and intermingles them with interviews for television, magazines
and newspapers. The same handful of ideas gets explained, or not, a number of
times, in different ways.
Yet I found it a curiously engaging and intelligent book, too. Chaitin’s
obsession is metamathematics: arguments about the…
