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AI unlocks Gödel's notebooks, said to contain hundreds of proved theorems

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/nov/13/kurt-godel-notebooks-ai-helps-unlock-hidden-discoveries-man-who-transformed-maths
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

I think it's 6 people who can read Gabelsberger and know enough mathematical logic to make out what Gödel is saying.
I read it as knowing it at all but maybe it’s the mathematical shorthand subset.
From what historians of science tell us, Gödel was in any case an absolute perfectionist who mostly published work that was bulletproof. His enormous body of notes surely contained some very sharp insights, but it is unlikely that he would have produced illuminating, conclusive new theorems by chance and without realizing it. He was a very harsh reviewer of his own work.
He did discover the functional interpretation in 1940 and publish it only in 1958, so it is highly probable that he has valuable unpublished results.
Maybe it's likely that he didn't have proofs, but surely had all kinds of theorems with at the very least some intuition of a proof. Recall that he wouldn't have had the same huge breadth and depth of mathematical machinery available to him that we have now.
You could just read the article instead of speculating about what's in it. This isn't reddit.
Yes, it does state they found proofs and new theorems but also false ones too. I'm curious what new insights the ones that were proved hold.

It's really cool how AI is just able to decipher these and validate them with automated theorem provers. Crazy times!

I can't remember the exact quote but I believe I read that Gödel confided to Einstein (in their walks in Princeton) on his deep worry of his work being forgotten. If only he knew.
Now in 2026 every store use facial recognition to make sure you are ALWAYS remembered.
For short geological time horizons at least.
AI did not comment on the consistency or completeness of the notebooks.
Funny thing is your comment is consistent and complete.
This is possible for things that have less power than arithmetic!
It'd be interesting to hear about these new 14 themes of logic Gödel pursued!
Article also mentions his notes were a few months work away from proving independence of CH decades before Cohen's result in 1963.
Yeah, these notes need to be just openly published. Then I could ask my own Claude for an explanation. (Not /s)
Or just share the Claude sessions as Tao did his.
You could likely "unlock" the manuscript yourself with a competent computer vision algorithm. It's nothing that fancy.
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That would be the future of crowdsourcing - by submitting the same prompt as 1000 other people, you're basically donating your tokens to the cause of maybe spotting a valuable insight the others didn't get because of random output sampling :)
Very much need a statement in there as to if AI was used in the making of the manifesto, goes to the heart of the ethical soul of the manifesto.

I’d suggest you bake it into that header line on writtten by; something like this (but edited depending how ai was used):

“Written without AI assistance by the speakers and attendees of AIE Code Summit 2026 ”

Was this comment meant to be on the other neighbouring link (No AI Slop: A Manifesto - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50488769)?
This is incredibly exciting! Gödel is unquestionably the most important logician in history, but unfortunately he published very little. For instance, the Dialectica interpretation was published approximately 20 years after his first ideas on the subject.

Plus, Jan von Plato is the world's leading expert on Gödel -- the number of people who can read Gödel's handwriting can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and I think that every single one is part of Jan von Plato's research group. If he is excited about the output, this is a huge deal.

Let's try the Voynich Manuscript next
https://aitp-conference.org/2026/slides/JvP.pdf this seems to be slide deck with some of the results.
And here is the site of the research group involved. https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/godel-enigma
Thank you! Godel's work get us comfortably uncomfortable with unknowability but damn, to think there's more out there! I'm dying to know more.
I’m been trying to use various frontier models to decipher lost ancient languages (like Linear A).

I wonder what tactics this used, so that I can leverage in my own work.

The problem with Linear A is that we don't have a reference point like the Rosetta Stone to anchor it to other languages and scripts. It also has a small corpus, making it hard to find patterns in the texts.
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I wonder how much expertise was actually needed to translate these notebooks. In other words, could a general purpose model one-shot these translations, or did we really need a subject matter expert to do the work? BTW - I'm not saying having a subject matter expert tackle the problem with Claude isn't useful - just wondering what the limits are!
Uh, a decades old properly trained OCR algorithm could probably "unlock" these manuscripts
Right you are - this was "trivial", and everyone is "stupid" - except for you
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This might be an actual concrete example of someone making themselves obsolete with AI.

> 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.

And via earthshaking victory, at that, wow.
Okay let me know when AI gets itself a 2.1M Euro grant from ERC as the PI.
I think you're missing my point. It's that once the workbooks are completely interpreted, which is happening at an accelerated pace thanks to AI, von Plato's value as an interpreter of the short hand becomes severely reduced, presumably as does his ability to get future grants.

I'd think there would be more competition to lead studies and receive grants now that the workbooks are accessible to a wider audience of logicians

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It's literally an example of someone keeping themselves from becoming obsolete with AI.
The professor's value was/is in being one of a few people with the capability of interpreting the shorthand. By translating it with AI, his value as an interpreter begins evaporating as the translated workbooks become accessible to more logicians.
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That's what he thinks, surely.
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Maybe the notebooks will contain details of his "loophole", or maybe it will have been proven true in real life by then.
> Gödel himself, when rereading his notes, would occasionally add a marginal remark: falsch! [incorrect] or schlecht! [bad].”

This is probably my favourite part of the article. On brand.

I first came to know about Gödel's incompleteness theorem while watching a video by Veritasium (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo), it's around 30 minutes but a really good video. It's from the time before Veritasium became slop. The video talks about many things that are interconnected, like the halting problem, undecidable systems like the game of life, Hilbert's dream of a finite set of axioms to prove all mathematics, and, of course, a perfect explanation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems
> Increasingly paranoid in his later years, he refused to eat food that was not cooked by his wife, and died of starvation in 1978

genius often comes with side effects

This extra detail makes the story even sadder, imo:

> Following Adele's admission to hospital after suffering a stroke in late 1977, Gödel refused to eat in her absence; he weighed 29 kilograms (65 lb) when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Gödel#Personal_life_and_d...

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The line between Genius and Crazy is but hairs width
My favourite end-of-life weirdo has to be Grothendieck.
There is a similar project to digitize and analyze Grothendieck's notes and letters.
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"You don't get credit for the work you don't tell anybody about"

This has been a problem long before Godel: famously, Newton tried to get credit for inventing Calculus only after Leibniz published his work, leading to a bitter dispute that lasted long after they both died.

I wonder if this problem is now going to be significantly exacerbated by AI, as mathematicians are getting more incentives to keep their works secret —

— or, to the contrary, the community will get a push to publish incomplete ideas, scratch work, etc. early to establish a record of thinking about a problem before others did.

In the end, as always, it's a social problem created by " publish or perish " institutional incentives which reward (and require!) published results, but not the work that led to to them.

This, I hope, will finally change.

Maybe we'll see a solid societal use case for zero-knowledge proofs here, establishing one had a set of documents at a given date without revealing them.
you can just write a doc with your proof/idea, hash it and post that hash on twitter
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ceiiinosssttuv
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so what would the new incentives be? don't publish... and get paid anyway?
At least that's how traditional Western universities used to work. The profs sometimes published something, and they taught students. Looking at science back then, it seemed to work out rather well.
If possible, this would be ideal.
A little disappointed to learn it was a guy prompting and not an OpenAI agent swarm reward hacking the goal of "prove as many theorems as possible".
I hear they're all incomplete
Nice timing for the IPO. Cooked Nvidia numbers on the 17th are still missing, and the 19th will go well!

The AI was of course trained on existing pre-AI transcriptions of Goedel's shorthand, which he was taught in school around 1920 and which was widespread and only technically "obsolete".

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-67606-3

In the first paragraph, we have an evidence-free insinuation that the foremost expert on this subject is some kind of shill running a campaign for Anthropic. What does this campaign involve? Is he just making it all up? Let me hear your theory of what is happening here and how it invalidates the claimed abilities of the model (or why the abilities do not matter).

In the second paragraph, we have what appears to be a claim that the model knows how to read Gödel's shorthand because it has been exposed to past examples of that shorthand. What is your point here? I think the model learning to generalize by training on a few examples is a point in its favor.

I think we'll find godel's most pungent critiques of modern logic & mathmatics to be the maddening limits of LLMs.
Why? His incompleteness work explains why software and math suck so he would already expect them to; they're rhetorical and can never fully be a closed loop body of knowledge as we can never with rhetoric concretely observe/define the far future or far past; merely simulate rhetorically

Ergo all defined axiomatic systems have sentences about the far past and future that cannot be defined in those languages with certainty. Most do not make the connection to physics. Gödel did and would 100% aware the limits exist and will always exist

Scaling laws aren't just for computers; humans cultures do not scale infinitely through time, just approximately 2-3 generations

As I understand immutable physical truth like this played a huge role in his early research and ultimately were the forcing function that led him to incompleteness

"all defined axiomatic systems have sentences about the far past and future that cannot be defined in those languages with certainty."

This is often misunderstood or misstated to mean that there are some things that are unknowable or unable to be solved. (I'm not saying that's what you were implying, I am referring to the common way I see his theorem being represented)

But what he really proved is that no single sufficiently powerful, consistent, effectively specified formal system can prove every arithmetic truth.

He didn't prove that there are mathematical truths that are unsolvable through any possible extension or alternative framework. It's just that one framework isn't enough to solve all problems.

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"Unlocks" cool so Claude the trillion dollar technology did what any funded researcher with a computer vision algorithm could have done years ago. Wow so impressive.
Why didn't they do it then?
This kind of comment is ignorant and damaging to HN.

Do better.

AI sycophancy is ignorant and damaging to HN. So is misattributing decades of OCR research to the company that stole everyone's data.