alt Hacker NewsI think the comment was poking fun at the phrase, "to formalize all of mathematics".
That makes it sound like all possible mathematics past and future in all conceivable worlds. And we already know there are undecidable or unprovable statements, higher-order logics that cannot be fully formalized, concepts about axioms themselves that cannot be axiomatized, etc.
So it cannot mean "all of mathematics", strictly speaking. Just the areas in existing mathematics that have (or can have) formal proofs.
Well since one of the authors of TFA is literally the person who was asked by the association of symbolic logic to give the memorial lecture for Goedel’s centenary the comment could scarcely have been wider of the mark.
Feels like every time formalization is mentioned on hn somebody mentions incompleteness as though mathematicians in the field have never heard of it. It’s kind of annoying at this point. It’s like if every time we talked about a computer algorithm someone popped in to say “Have you heard of ‘On Computable Numbers’? Alan Turing would like a word.”
People in the field know about these things probably better than we do. They are aware of the consequences of completeness/incompleteness, decidability, computability etc. In fact Goedel’s completness and 2 incompleteness theorems have been formalized in lean as part of mathlib4 https://formalizedformallogic.org/Book/first_order/goedel1.h...