The stuff about Gabelsberger shorthand sounds ludicrous to me. My father would write notes in a custom version of it until his death 2020.

Officially (i.e. in schools teaching stenography, back in the day) it was long ago replaced by "unified German shorthand" (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift IIRC), but he always considered Gabelsberger to be superior.

Well, maybe he too was one of the 6 people in the world who could read it (or yes, maybe that was hyperbole, I'm not sure) :D

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hongsy 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Von Plato said he had started his Gödel project in 2017 because he was facing mandatory retirement from Helsinki University. “What should I do to make myself indispensable? Oh yes, I’ll start reading Gödel’s enigmatic shorthand pages!” He received a €2.5m (£2.1m) grant from the European Research Council, taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand – “I am one of only six people who can read it in the world” – and assembled a small team.

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semolinapudding a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's 6 people who can read Gabelsberger and know enough mathematical logic to make out what Gödel is saying.

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throwaway81523 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The notebooks were transcribed to regular German by a couple[0] who learned Gabelsberger just for that purpose. There is a bunch of analysis of them in Gödel's 5-volume Collected Works, iirc mostly volume 4. I'm surprised if there was any interesting mathematical content left to be found. The question that mathematicians wondered about the most was whether Gödel made any progress on the independence of the continuum hypothesis and axiom of choice (both later proved by Cohen). It appeared that he had some thoughts about it but didn't get anywhere. The Guardian article says Gödel was close to a proof of AC's independence but I'm skeptical.

The question the public wondered about the most was the loophole Gödel claimed to have found in the US Constitution, but they didn't find anything about that.[1]

There's a cool suspense novel "The God Proof" about finding a lost Gödel notebook extending Gödel's ontological "proof" of the existence of God.[2]

0. John Dawson (a logician) and his wife whose name I think is Cheryl (not sure). John Dawson later wrote the Gödel biography "Logical Dilemmas".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_loophole

2. https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/gp/God_Proof.pdf

	▲	mjcohen 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Trump has been showing the loophole in real time. He would have shown more if the Democrats hadn't won.

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aaronrobinson a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I read it as knowing it at all but maybe it’s the mathematical shorthand subset.