In the 1960s, mathematician and computer scientist Gregory Chaitin published a landmark paper in the field of algorithmic information theory in the Journal of the ACM – and he was only a teenager. Listen in as Robert J. Marks explores that paper with Chaitin, covering Chaitin’s definition of randomness and his philosophical interest in algorithmic information theory.

Show Notes

• 00:27 | Introducing Gregory Chaitin
• 01:12 | Chaitin’s landmark paper published in his teen years
• 02:04 | Chaitin’s definition of randomness
• 08:43 | Metaphysics
• 10:30 | Chaitin’s philosophical interest
• 19:24 | Fermat’s Last Theorem

Additional Resources

• Gregory Chaitin’s Website
• “On the length of programs for computing finite binary sequences,” by Gregory Chaitin, published when he as a teenager. (Journal of the ACM (JACM) 13, no. 4 (1966): 547-569).
• Unravelling Complexity: The Life and Work of Gregory Chaitin, edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Francisco Antonio Doria
• Karl Popper
• The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
• Hermann Weyl
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Leibniz’s Discours de Métaphysique (in English)
• “A Theory of Program Size Formally Identical to Information Theory” by Gregory Chaitin (Journal of the ACM (JACM) 22, no. 3 (1975): 309-440).
• Ray Solomonoff
• Marvin Minsky
• Fermat’s Last Tango on YouTube

(Portions of this transcript have been altered to clarify the content).