Kurt Gödel left 1,009 pages of densely written text – much of it in an obsolete shorthand – which is now said to contain hundreds of proved theorems
The Austrian logician Kurt Gödel was one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. His two incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, transformed mathematics and paved the way for the digital age.
After his seminal results of the 1930s, Gödel published only a few papers. His unpublished work, however, runs to tens of thousands of pages, and is of great interest to historians of science.
Since 2017, the Finnish logician Jan von Plato has led a project at Helsinki University to understand the contents of 16 notebooks that Gödel wrote in the early 1940s. This material – the “workbooks” – is 1,009 pages of densely written text about maths and logic. Much of it is written in a German shorthand, Gabelsberger, that was obsolete even when Gödel was using it.
Progress in the mathematical understanding of the text was painfully slow – about a page a week – until September, when von Plato enlisted the help of the AI model Claude. Within a couple of days, Claude had provided a comprehensive digest of the entire material, revealing Gödel had proved hundreds of theorems that no one knew about.
