Scott Aaronson | How Much Math Is Knowable?
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pointed to in Busy Beaver threads as an accessible expert talk on the topic.
What it is
Scott Aaronson's Harvard CMSA talk traces what mathematical truths are knowable, from Godel and Turing to the Busy Beaver function. He covers recent work on Busy Beaver values.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2025 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends ks2048 · 2025-09 · on “Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value”
An interesting thing about this is that they figured out a high-level description of what this Busy Beaver program is doing - it's computing a Collatz-like sequence until it terminates. I'm not sure if that is described in this paper, but I learned about it in this Scott Aaronson talk, [this video] e.g see the slide at 31:40.
Cites nthingtohide · 2025-04 · on “AI Horseless Carriages”
Feature Request: Can we have dark mode for videos? An AI OS should be able to understand and satisfy such a usecases. E.g. Scott Aaronson | How Much Math Is Knowable? [this video] The video slides could be converted into a dark mode for night viewing.
Cites vismit2000 · 2025-06 · on “BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large”
Scott Aaronson | How Much Math Is Knowable? [Harward CMSA]: [this video] Recently on HN (couple of months ago): [LINK]