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Article 5297 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas Clarke)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Godel's Incompleteness Theorm
Message-ID: <1992Apr27.132702.25092@cs.ucf.edu>
Date: 27 Apr 92 13:27:02 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.1992Apr27.132702.25092
References: <2484@ucl-cs.uucp>
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In article <2484@ucl-cs.uucp> G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly) writes:
> Also, you may need this word as part of
> your study:
> 
> DEFINE grok
> DEFINITION 0
> grok \'gro-\ \'gru:\ \'gro-w\ \'gro-(-*)r\ vb or grokked;  or grok.ing
>    [ME groken, fr. OE gro-kan; akin to OHG gruokan] 1: to think in a
>    certain way - possibly `GROK - Grok's Recurisve OK?'' (obscure) 2:
>    a new departure in thought.
> 
Isn't "grok" from Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land"?  My definition would  
be more like:

To understand holistically, to comprehend in a Zen-like fashion.

Having gotten used to recursion (in von Neumann's sense of getting used to  
mathematics), one might then be said to grok recursion.  Eventually one can  
learn to grok the proof of G"\odel's theorem, but as the mythology of  
mathematics has it, this may result in a trip to a sanitarium as happened to  
G"\odel. 

Of course, "grok" may have mutated in meaning considerably since its 60's  
usage.


