Harvey Friedman is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most consequential mathematical logicians alive. The Guinness Book of World Records lists him as the youngest professor at a major research institution: at eighteen, Stanford hired him as an assistant professor of philosophy, months after he finished his PhD at MIT under Gerald Sacks with a dissertation titled Subsystems of Analysis.
Kurt Gödel personally sponsored his last paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He won the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1984 for “the revitalization of the foundations of mathematics.” He founded Reverse Mathematics in 1974, delivered the Tarski Lectures at Berkeley in 2007, and received an honorary doctorate from Ghent in 2013. He’s been featured in TIME, New Scientist, and Nautilus.
Like, man… I can keep going!
Anyhow, he’s spent most of his life on one question: can ordinary finite mathematics be trusted? His theorems say no. This episode is an exploration into why.
We cover:
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