Kolmogorov the Genius

 

It feels a bit odd when your mathematical heroes are so far away from your usual heroes. 

Take Gentzen, for instance: maybe he was misguided, and incompetent as far as political views go and not genuinely evil. But the fact is that he was a card-carrying Nazi too and that doesn't feel good. Maybe this is compensated by Dummett being a card-carrying good guy in the fight against racism through his whole life, I don't know. But I worry that someone is going to come up with a story of hypocrisy or something. Hope not!

Meanwhile, I wonder if I am the only one noticing that Kolmogorov/Alexandrov is the biggest gay love story ever? they always met in the same holiday house for more than 40 years. and they were not coy to mention which other in all sorts of official documents. they were both married, but still, how did they manage? The Wikipedia article does point it out.

A controversial life altogether: a nobleman, with an unmarried mother who died of chilbirth, a father who disappeared in the Civil War, the Suslin affair, the Soviet honours, the dedication to teaching. and the creation of whole gigantic areas of mathematics, the engine of the transformations in our society. 

But yes, the blog post is to remind me to read properly Kolmogorov's 1925 article

• 1925. "On the principle of the excluded middle" in Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press: 414–37.

and to keep a link to the London Mathematical Society Kolmogorov Obituary, (https://londmathsoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1112/blms/22.1.31).

Maybe this seems crazy, but I also wanted to add here a comment about Dan Hernest recently published paper "Modal Functional Dialectica Interpretation" with Triffonov. Because they start with 

Functional interpretations, derived from Goedels's computability adaptation of Aristotle's insights...

and I wanted to know what were these  Aristotle's insights that were referred to, so I wrote to Dan. But to him it was folklore, in Romanian, via the philosopher Mircea Florian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Florian, who translated Aristotle from old Greek. So no clear reference here.

I wanted to thank Samuel Gomes da Silva for all the work together in the last ten years! It has certainly kept me going!  

Thanks also to the Logicas Brasileiras for the Carol Blasio Day! It was a blast, as it's usually the case with our antics. But more about it in the next post.