Blog #3

STOCK:

“Within any consistent logical system capable of elementary arithmetic, there must be such accursed statements, true but unprovable.  Thus, Gödel showed that a consistent formal system must be incomplete; no complete or consistent system can exist.” – Kurt Gödel

Mathematicians before Gödel and Shannon believed there was an absolute perfection to mathematics.  From this belief, the telephone and telegraph were developed to communicate between people, cities, and businesses.  Mathematicians were used to develop a form of symbolism to effectively transmit messages between the transmitter and the receiver.  However, these systems were complex and most of the physicists and mathematicians working to discover a better way, always found a glitch that kept them from perfecting the transmission of the content. Examples of problems were the electrons causing static noise on the communication with the telephone and the rapid growth making the switch board operator job ineffective and impractical with too large of a system developed in large cities.  Mathematicians like Gödel, Shannon, and Nyquist worked to develop a mathematical equation to solve the amount of information that would be transmitted in a particular message based on the amount of content trying to be sent.  However, with each discovery came a problem, this is where I feel Gödel’s belief that no consistent formal system can exist.  Society must trust the system set in place by the qualified academia and believe it will be the most effective way. 

From this, I believe Shannon and Gödel best suggest how higher education will be in 20 years because math and science have been essential in the development of our current society.  Also, the belief that one formal system will be incomplete and no consistent one can exist is true because our education system is always looking to develop and improve the content of their classes.  Another example is the difference between colleges and high schools, whether they are private, public, universities or community colleges, the same class may be taught at each one, but the content and assignments used to convey the information may be different.  In the next 20 years, I can’t see our education system being much different than it is today.  With the number of schools across the World, it would be impossible to have one consistent formal system used by all to teach students the same subject.  It will be dependent on all variables, like the school, the professor, the teaching style, the learning style of the students and what materials are used to teach the subject.