Scott Aaronson | How Much Math Is Knowable?

Harvard CMSA · 57.7K views · 2025-04-22 · 1:06:43

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Overview

Scott Aaronson's Harvard CMSA talk traces what mathematical truths are knowable, from Godel and Turing to the Busy Beaver function. He covers recent work on Busy Beaver values.

On Hacker News

Pointed to in Busy Beaver threads as an accessible expert talk on the topic.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2025–2025

Topics

Computability & complexity theory Logic & formal methods

What people said

ks2048 · 2025-09 · Recommendation
An interesting thing about this is that they figured out a high-level description of what this Busy Beaver program is doing - it's computing a Collatz-like sequence until it terminates. I'm not sure if that is described in this paper, but I learned about it in this Scott Aaronson talk, [VIDEO] e.g see the slide at 31:40.
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vismit2000 · 2025-06 · Reference
Scott Aaronson | How Much Math Is Knowable? [Harward CMSA]: [VIDEO] Recently on HN (couple of months ago): [LINK]
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nthingtohide · 2025-04 · Reference
Feature Request: Can we have dark mode for videos? An AI OS should be able to understand and satisfy such a usecases. E.g. Scott Aaronson | How Much Math Is Knowable? [VIDEO] The video slides could be converted into a dark mode for night viewing.
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Sources

Video by Harvard CMSA, played through YouTube.

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