If you can read this book cover-to-cover, you're an absolute hero. Sometimes I wonder if they inserted a big logical error in the middle just to troll people under the assumption nobody would bother to read it.
I read GEB cover to cover and haven’t stopped thinking about it for years. Not a brag, a nudge that it’s not impenetrable and more people should read it.
EDIT: source: took logic as undergrad + wrote on the tractatus which required a lot of pre-reqs to understand. 0 chance a course at undergrad level ever assigns principia mathematica. Most charitable interepretation: some pages of it + was on a bibliography. not required reading.
if feel embarrassed, that is the consequence for lieing. There is such a thing as intellectual honesty.
I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a thousand pages of APL symbols without introducing a bug?
There's a reason mathematics was known as "penalty copy" and was notoriously difficult to typeset and even more difficult to turn a profit on.
For a deep dive into both ends of that, see the history of publication of Knuth's TAoCP where the text was originally published traditionally by setting metal type on a composition machine (to the extent possible), then compositors would add the additional characters and spacing material necessary to compose the equations and so forth so as to lay out a galley (which would then be proofed/corrected) --- a successive edition was then typeset using an early imagesetter, which looked so ghastly that DEK considered giving up, but when informed that the imagesetter was controlled by a computer declared, "I am a computer scientist, I can fix that." and expected to knock out a typesetting system over his next sabbatical....
Roughly a decade later, TeX 1.0 was released.... the current version is 3.141592653 (with new versions adding another decimal place as the version tends towards \pi) --- while we're still waiting on the full publication of Vol. 4, it is widely considered that TeX was worth the delay.
I have a copy and like it much. However, i was always partial to Frege's Begriffschrift. His notation was really creative. It's a shame Russel's deflation of that project has sentenced it to the rubbish heap of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Mathematical_P...
and for ease of reading see the various PDF versions at:
https://people.umass.edu/klement/imp/
More seriously, there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.
Which leads us to our next impenetrable book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
It's also pretty typically a part of History Of Mathematics and Philosophy of Mathematics courses.
No it wasn't.
And you did not read it.
EDIT: source: took logic as undergrad + wrote on the tractatus which required a lot of pre-reqs to understand. 0 chance a course at undergrad level ever assigns principia mathematica. Most charitable interepretation: some pages of it + was on a bibliography. not required reading.
if feel embarrassed, that is the consequence for lieing. There is such a thing as intellectual honesty.
For a deep dive into both ends of that, see the history of publication of Knuth's TAoCP where the text was originally published traditionally by setting metal type on a composition machine (to the extent possible), then compositors would add the additional characters and spacing material necessary to compose the equations and so forth so as to lay out a galley (which would then be proofed/corrected) --- a successive edition was then typeset using an early imagesetter, which looked so ghastly that DEK considered giving up, but when informed that the imagesetter was controlled by a computer declared, "I am a computer scientist, I can fix that." and expected to knock out a typesetting system over his next sabbatical....
Roughly a decade later, TeX 1.0 was released.... the current version is 3.141592653 (with new versions adding another decimal place as the version tends towards \pi) --- while we're still waiting on the full publication of Vol. 4, it is widely considered that TeX was worth the delay.