"Ahead of His Time": AI Helps Unlock Discoveries Hidden in Notebooks of Man Who Transformed Maths

A recent article in The Guardian highlights how artificial intelligence has been used to uncover hundreds of previously unknown theorems in the notebooks of mathematical logician Kurt Gödel, who was associated with the Institute from 1933 until his death in 1978. 

Gödel, who is described as "one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century," wrote the sixteen notebooks in the early 1940s after settling in Princeton. Much of their "densely written text" is in an obsolete German shorthand. A team led by Jan von Plato of the University of Helsinki had been studying them at a rate of about a page a week until September, when the AI model Claude produced a 650-page analysis within days.

Among the findings, the notebooks shed light on Gödel’s claim that he had proved the independence of the axiom of choice, decades before Paul Cohen, Member (1959–61, 1967) in the School of Mathematics, won the 1966 Fields Medal for the result. Gödel was "just one step away," von Plato told The Guardian. Deeming Gödel to be "far ahead of his time," the research team now plans to explore his physics and cosmology notebooks.

Read more at The Guardian.