I wonder how much expertise was actually needed to translate these notebooks. In other words, could a general purpose model one-shot these translations, or did we really need a subject matter expert to do the work? BTW - I'm not saying having a subject matter expert tackle the problem with Claude isn't useful - just wondering what the limits are!

This might be an actual concrete example of someone making themselves obsolete with AI.

> Von Plato said he had started his Gödel project in 2017 because he was facing mandatory retirement from Helsinki University. “What should I do to make myself indispensable? Oh yes, I’ll start reading Gödel’s enigmatic shorthand pages!” He received a €2.5m (£2.1m) grant from the European Research Council, taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand – “I am one of only six people who can read it in the world” – and assembled a small team.

Maybe the notebooks will contain details of his "loophole", or maybe it will have been proven true in real life by then.

> Gödel himself, when rereading his notes, would occasionally add a marginal remark: falsch! [incorrect] or schlecht! [bad].”

This is probably my favourite part of the article. On brand.

I first came to know about Gödel's incompleteness theorem while watching a video by Veritasium (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo), it's around 30 minutes but a really good video. It's from the time before Veritasium became slop. The video talks about many things that are interconnected, like the halting problem, undecidable systems like the game of life, Hilbert's dream of a finite set of axioms to prove all mathematics, and, of course, a perfect explanation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems

typical newspaper blown up wording.

> Increasingly paranoid in his later years, he refused to eat food that was not cooked by his wife, and died of starvation in 1978

genius often comes with side effects

"You don't get credit for the work you don't tell anybody about"

This has been a problem long before Godel: famously, Newton tried to get credit for inventing Calculus only after Leibniz published his work, leading to a bitter dispute that lasted long after they both died.

I wonder if this problem is now going to be significantly exacerbated by AI, as mathematicians are getting more incentives to keep their works secret —

— or, to the contrary, the community will get a push to publish incomplete ideas, scratch work, etc. early to establish a record of thinking about a problem before others did.

In the end, as always, it's a social problem created by " publish or perish " institutional incentives which reward (and require!) published results, but not the work that led to to them.

This, I hope, will finally change.

A little disappointed to learn it was a guy prompting and not an OpenAI agent swarm reward hacking the goal of "prove as many theorems as possible".