by G J Chaitin (IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center, New York)

In this mathematical autobiography, Gregory Chaitin presents a technical survey of his work and a nontechnical discussion of its significance. The volume is an essential companion to the earlier collection of Chaitin's papers Information, Randomness and Incompleteness, also published by World Scientific.

The technical survey contains many new results, including a detailed discussion of LISP program size and new versions of Chaitin's most fundamental information-theoretic incompleteness theorems. The nontechnical part includes the lecture given by Chaitin in Gšdel's classroom at the University of Vienna, a transcript of a BBC TV interview, and articles from New Scientist, La Recherche, and the Mathematical Intelligencer.

• Technical Survey:
  • Turing Machines
  • Blank-Endmarker Programs
  • LISP Program-Size Complexity
• Non-Technical Discussions:
  • A Random Walk in Arithmetic
  • Number and Randomness
  • Randomness in Arithmetic
• The Challenge for the Future:
  • Complexity and Biology
• Bibliography
  • and other papers