Cristian S Calude

RANDOMNESS AND COMPLEXITY, FROM LEIBNIZ TO CHAITIN

This book is a collection of papers written by a selection of eminent authors from around the world in honour of Gregory Chaitin's 60th birthday. This is a unique volume including technical contributions, philosophical papers and essays.

From Leibniz to Chaitin will inform and give pleasure to many diverse readerships. Logicians, philosophers and programmers, teachers and students, specialists and amateurs will find much to learn, to conjure with and, yes, perhaps to be inflamed by. Such is as should be, given the nature of Greg Chaitin's magnificent obsession, technical prowess, personal generosity and willingness to court controversy. It is hard to imagine a better sexagecimal birthday present for a scientist who perfectly exemplifies his own maxim

"To me, you understand something only if you can program it. (You, not someone else!)"

---Jonathan Borwein, FRSC, is a co-author of Mathematics by Experiment: Plausible Reasoning in the 21st Century.

Any volume that would do justice to Gregory Chaitin must be technically impeccable, philosophically daring, mathematically both deep and playful, and so intellectually exciting as to remind a lover of the world of mathematics what the love is all about. This is such a volume.

---Rebecca Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of The Mind-Body Problem, Strange Attractors, and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel.