Mathematicians Of The Day

22nd October



On this day in 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes which led to many Huguenot Protestants leaving France. Among mathematicians affected were Abraham de Moivre, Albert Girard, Joseph Saurin, Denis Papin and Francis Maseres.

Click on for a poster.


Quotation of the day

From Reinhold Baer
The main result of Gödel's paper ... can be formulated in a pointed and, hence not fully correct way as follows:
If A is a countable, consistent logical system, for example arithmetic, then there is a proposition in A which is not decidable in A (but may be decidable in extended systems).
Hurrah, logicians have also discovered diagonalisation!
Letter to Zermelo in 1931