Introduction to Metamathematics

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening reading
Review: Mathematicians are always aware of the precision and consistency of their asserts, so they need to be trained in the very fundamentals of their science.

This book provides an enlightening vision about the basis of mathematics exploring such abstract topics as the paradoxes of set theory, transfinite numbers, and much more.

I used this book as a reference in a course I gave on mathematical logic, set theory, and the fundamentals of the number systems.

Rating:
Summary: The classic of the classics
Review: This is one of those books that don't get old; although it was first published in 1952, and since then much has been made in Mathematical Logic, Kleene's book has that rare position of a book that influenced the subject on its own (and all the teaching books that came after). And if you are willing to understand Mathematical Logic, and principally the reasons behind most of the definitions, I think that this is the best book to start. As a reference it is perhaps the most cited book in the area. But the reading is pleasant, elegant and well motivated. This book has another kind of appeal, in my opinion - research in Logic split after the 1950's in two distinct areas: one, more mathematical in character, is called Model Theory and is strongly abstract, working mainly with the semantics; another, more philosophical and applied, deals mainly with the sintax - this last is the line of research of non-classical logics (philosophically interesting) and of automated procedures, like Smullyan's semantic tableaux for proof-theory (very useful for computation theory). Today the interconnections on these areas, that were initially very close, are dangerously disappearing. Kleene's book, having been written before this separation, is much more comprehensive than the modern textbooks. About the contents: it begins with a (very well) introduction explaining the meaning of Metamathematics. Then it treats Propositional, Predicate Calculi and Formal Number Theory, written in the classical spirit that unfortunately lacks today. The third part deals with recursive functions, and the author was a first-hand researcher in the field, with many important contributions. Finally, the last part treats Model Theory as it was known then (this section can be considered pretty incomplete today).