GWT2 — a second full draft

There is now a second third complete draft of the forthcoming new edition of Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears. You can download it here.

What’s changed? There has been a fair bit of typographical tidying (which you no doubt won’t notice, but I might as well try to make things consistent!). The index has grown a bit, though there is more work to be done there. Some typos have been removed, there have been some scattered minor changes in phrasing, and further changes to tidy the way topics in different chapters are linked together. But the main update has been to the chapter on the Diagonalization Lemma: I’ve hopefully much improved this by re-arranging the material in a more logical way.

So that’s enough by way of updating to be worth putting on line now. The first full draft has been downloaded about 650 times. If you are one of those actually reading it, you might want to download the new improved version.

To repeat what I said before: It is too late to write a very different book, and after all this is supposed to be just a revised edition of the seemingly quite well-liked GWT1! This is not the moment, then, for radical revisions. But otherwise, all suggestions, comments and corrections, including quick notes of the most trivial typos, will be most welcome! Send to the e-mail address on the first page of PDF, or comment here. (Just note the date of the version you are commenting on.) Comments will continue to be welcome for the next month or so.

Added Sept 17: revised version of second draft posted, with minor changes to Preface and Chapters 1 to 4.
Added Sept 18: revised version posted, this time with minor improvements to Chapter 5.
Added Sept 21: revised version posted, with mostly very minor improvements to Chapters 6 to 15 (the one substantive correction is at the very top of p.76 where I’d made an unnecessary assumption that we are dealing with a consistent theory).
Added Sept 22: second draft now replaced by a third draft

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