6-th CONGRESS OF ROMANIAN MATHEMATICIANS

Special Session: Mathematical Truth and Provability in the 21st Century

Organised in co-operation with the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science

The interplay between the notions of truth and provability was, at times, a major theme in the foundations of mathematics in the 20th century. This year is both the centenary of Brouwer's Amsterdam PhD thesis, in which he first presented to the world his ideas on intuitionism, and the 75th anniversary of the publication of Goedel's incompleteness theorems, arguably the most revolutionary results of the century. As the 1900s drew to a close, we saw the computer becoming more and more influential as a tool for establishing conjectures and for the sort of case-by-case analysis found in the Appel-Haken proof of the four-colour theorem, one that is too big for humans to execute. The purpose of this special session at the 6th Congress of Romanian Mathematicians is to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of results and viewpoints about truth and provability, in the light of 20th-century developments and with an eye on possible future interpretations of those notions.

The program