KIRK.TYM%OFFICE-2@sri-unix.UUCP (02/19/84)
From: Kirk Kelley <KIRK.TYM@OFFICE-2> I know of someone who talked with G. on the telephone about six years ago somewhere in Northern California. My friend developed a quantum logic for expressing paradoxes, and some forms of schyzophrenia, among other things. Puts fuzzy set theory to shame. Anyway, he wanted to get together with G. to discuss his own work and what he perceived in the Laws of Form as very fundamental problems in generality due to over-simplicity. G. refused to meet without being paid fifty or so dollars per hour. Others say that the LoF's misleading notation masks the absence of any significant proofs. They observe that the notation uses whitespace as an implicit operator, something that becomes obvious in an attempt to parse it when represented as character strings in a computer. I became interested in the Laws of Form when it first came out as it promised to be quite an elegant solution to the most obscure proofs of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. The LoF carried to perfection a very similar simplification I attempted while studying the same logical foundations of mathematics. One does not get too far into the proofs before getting the distinct feeling that there has GOT to be a better way. It would be interesting to see an attempt to express the essence of Go:del's sentence in the LoF notation. -- kirk