‘Ahead of his time’: AI helps unlock discoveries hidden in notebooks of man who transformed maths
Summary
Jan von Plato used the AI model Claude to analyze 16 notebooks written by Kurt Gödel in the early 1940s. Von Plato says the AI produced a digest of the material within days and revealed hundreds of previously unknown theorems, along with ideas that anticipated later work in logic.Key Facts
- Gödel’s 16 notebooks contain 1,009 pages of mathematical and logical writing.
- Much of the writing uses Gabelsberger, a German shorthand.
- Jan von Plato has led a Helsinki University project studying the notebooks since 2017.
- Before using AI, the team was progressing at about one page per week.
- Von Plato provided Claude with his transcriptions and books and research about Gödel.
- Claude produced a 650-page explanation of the notebooks within a couple of days, according to von Plato.
- Von Plato said the notebooks contain dozens of ideas that anticipate results from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as 14 unexplored themes in logic.
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