Chaitin, Gregory (1947 - )

Appeared in: ?.

"Gregory Chaitin is at the IBM Watson Research Center in New York. In the mid 1960s, when he was a teenager, he created algorithmic information theory (AIT), which combines, among other elements, Shannon's information theory and Turing's theory of computability. In the three decades since then he has been the principal architect of the theory. Among his contributions are the definition of a random sequence via algorithmic incompressibility, and his information-theoretic approach to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. His work on Hilbert's 10th problem has shown that in a sense there is randomness in arithmetic, in other words, that God not only plays dice in quantum mechanics and nonlinear dynamics, but even in elementary number theory. His latest achievement has been to transform AIT into a theory about the size of real computer programs, programs that you can actually run. He is the author of six books: Algorithmic Information Theory published by Cambridge University Press; Information, Randomness & Incompleteness and Information-Theoretic Incompleteness, both published by World Scientific; and The Limits of Mathematics, The Unknowable and Exploring Randomness, all published by Springer-Verlag. In 1995 he was given the degree of doctor of science honoris causa by the University of Maine, and he was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology. In 1998 he was named visiting professor at the University of Buenos Aires."
-quoted from G J Chaitin Homepage

For more information:

Picture from

Send comments about this page to djj@andrew.cmu.edu