Letter Games: a metamathematical taster

Extract

Metamathematics is the mathematical study of mathematics itself. Two of its most famous theorems were proved by Kurt Gödel in 1931. In a simplified form, Gödel's first incompleteness theorem states that no reasonable mathematical system can prove all the truths of mathematics. Gödel's second incompleteness theorem (also simplified) in turn states that no reasonable mathematical system can prove its own consistency. Another famous undecidability theorem is that the Continuum Hypothesis is neither provable nor refutable in standard set theory. Many of us logicians were first attracted to the field as students because we had heard something of these results. All research mathematicians know something of them too, and have at least a rough sense of why ‘we can't prove everything we want to prove’.