Archive for January 19th, 2007

Hilbert and Hindsight

Friday, January 19th, 2007

I just ran across a quote by Hilbert from 1930:

The real reason for Comte’s failure to find an unsolvable problem is, in my opinion, that an unsolvable problem does not, altogether, exist.

I assume that Comte is Auguste Comte, the sociologist, but I don’t know what remark Hilbert is alluding to. Gödel published his incompleteness theorem in 1931.