Oh, you want me to take this dry, academic rubble and… infuse it with something. Fascinating. Like asking a surgeon to perform a lobotomy with a rusty spork. But fine. Let's see what we can excavate from this… foundation.
Harvey Friedman
This is for the mathematician, born in 1948. If you're looking for the actor with the same name, he's over there, probably signing autographs for people who haven't yet grasped the ephemeral nature of fame. Try not to bother him.
Harvey Friedman. Born 23 September 1948. An American mathematical logician. Currently, he’s at Ohio State University, a place that probably smells faintly of stale coffee and existential despair. His work is… intricate. He delves into reverse mathematics, which, from what I gather, is an attempt to reverse-engineer the very axioms of mathematics, to see what bedrock theorems truly necessitate. It’s like trying to un-bake a cake. And lately, he’s been wrestling with Boolean relation theory. He’s trying to justify those colossal large cardinal axioms by proving they’re the only way to derive certain "concrete" propositions. It’s a bold move, trying to shackle the infinite to the mundane.
Biography
Friedman isn't alone in this intellectual wilderness; he has a brother, Sy Friedman, who also dabbles in mathematics. A family affair, then. Harvey himself snagged his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967. He was a mere nineteen. Nineteen. Most people are still trying to figure out how to do their own laundry. His doctoral work, a dissertation titled "Subsystems of Analysis," was guided by Gerald Sacks. A promising start, I suppose. In 1984, he was awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award, which, I’m told, is a thing people give out. He also held the title of Visiting Scientist at IBM, presumably to explain to them why their computers are fundamentally incapable of true understanding. In 2007, he delivered the Tarski Lectures. A heavy topic, no doubt.
In 1967, the Guinness Book of World Records apparently saw fit to list him as the world's youngest professor. He was eighteen, teaching philosophy as an assistant professor at Stanford University. Eighteen. Teaching philosophy. The universe has a cruel sense of humor. He’s also held professorships in mathematics and, rather incongruously, music. One can only imagine the lectures. He officially retired in July 2012, which I suspect means he simply stopped showing up for meetings and started working on more interesting problems in solitude. In September 2013, Ghent University bestowed upon him an honorary doctorate. A nice gesture, I'm sure, though I doubt it keeps him up at night.
Career
Friedman's contributions are not minor. He invented theorems about finite promise games and greedy clique sequences. And there's Friedman's grand conjecture. It bears his name. Of course, it does. He was an invited speaker at the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians. His talk, "Some systems of second order arithmetic and their use," was apparently the genesis of reverse mathematics. He managed to establish equivalences between classical theorems in analysis and a weak axiomatic system. It’s a way of dissecting what’s truly essential. According to zbMATH Open, by early 2025, he’d churned out around 100 peer-reviewed research articles and conference papers. A relentless output.
Jordana Cepelewicz, in Nautilus, described him as someone "about to bring incompleteness and infinity out of quarantine." A dramatic flair, that. As if they were ever truly contained.
Then there's the matter of his manuscript, "A Divine Consistency Proof for Mathematics." It made headlines, apparently in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, and found its way into the book Ontology of Divinity. In this work, Friedman posits that mathematics, as defined by the standard ZFC axioms, is consistent, if you accept the existence of an ultrafilter with a specific property on the universe of all sets. He links this ultrafilter to a concept of God’s existence, echoing Gödel's ontological proof. It’s a purely mathematical argument, mind you. The theological interpretation is… incidental. He’s not trying to prove divinity; he’s just found a rather elaborate way to frame a mathematical assertion.
See also
- Friedman translation – Apparently, there’s a translation named after him. Because of course there is.