15-150 Bonus Lecture - Gödel, Escher, Bach and Incompleteness
July 13, 2026 11:00AM—12:20PM
Location:
In Person
-
Tepper Building 1403
Speaker:
BRANDON WU
https://brandonspark.github.io/
Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is an exploration of the emergence of intelligence and "self" through simple recursive rules. Through examples in math, music, and art, we see how complex behavior seems to arise from self-referential simple elements, and how meaning originates from seemingly meaningless parts.
In this lecture, we introduce the book before attempting to tackle Hofstadter's presentation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which through a self-referential argument asserts that any sufficiently strong system of mathematics can never prove all true statements within itself.
All are welcome to attend. No prior experience necessary.